Prototype
by linabianca
Summary: Old.
1. War

**Hey you guys! It's me, Lina, and I've decided to start another story. I'm very sorry for discontinuing Backfired Dreams, but I just ran out of ideas. I'm sorry. I really drove myself into a corner with that one. I won't do that with this story, as I have a pretty hefty outline already drawn up.**

**So this is actually the revised version of chapter one. I wrote the first draft over two years ago, went back and read, and was very, very appalled at how much I _hated_ it. Lol. So I wanted to make it a little better. I've started a revising project. So if the next chapter is horrible, just bare with me until I make it better. I think they start getting readable around chapter five, "Fair". Those shouldn't take as much time to revise as the beginning ones will. This took me forever.**

**Anyway, I enjoy a good review, yet I obviously won't penalize you for not giving me a bunch. I love constructive criticism, but I'd rather not be yelled at. I suppose if you must get out how much you hate it, go nuts. Just don't be mad when I yell back for your rudeness. I love answering reviewers, so expect a PM in response to all your loveliness! All right. I suppose that's it. Here we go.**

**Disclaimer: I will put this here _once_ and one time only. (Actually, they may be at the beginning of the not yet revised chapters, but from here on out I find myself getting tired of writing them all the time.) So this will have to do. I don't own Inuyasha (obviously), and that is that! **

**Okay. Have fun you guys. Oh, and it may take you second to get used to the writing style. It's a little odd. Bare with me, okay?  


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Kagome stopped in front of a locker. No, it was not her locker, and no, she did not care. She was pretty damn certain no one would dare tell her to get out of the way—unless, of course, they were sporting pretty hefty set of extra balls. She almost hoped _someone_ around here was; her week had been terribly boring. And though she wasn't there purely for the fun little fact of irritating the owner, she wouldn't be lying if she'd said she wanted something, anything interesting to happen to her, or someone, somewhere. She just needed a moment to stop and fix her lipstick. She (with the poise that only came with doing this, like, ten times a day, every day) slid the stick over her lips, one side to the other, then back again, leaving a trail of glistening, deep red. Yes, it was flashy (she was aware), but she demanded to be in some way distinguishable from hundreds of other girls passing her by.

She kept her head held high and never minded the fact that the tall, slim, lots-and-lots-of pink wearing, graceful (supposedly?), slender—oh, what else?—_bitchy_ girls of her school would try oh, so very hard to intimidate her with their snickering. She figured they were a small percentage of people she had to deal with, so _why_, exactly, should she care? She didn't mind simply because while all the pink-bitch-girls (she had dubbed them that) were smirking at her with their false triumphant stares, the guys behind them were staring at her with a—how do you say—_different_ kind of look.

What kind of different? Well, that all just depends on how one looks at it. It was amusing to her, really, it was. She had a stereotype of boys, that they were… oh, what had she decided on… dumb, mean, predictable? However, to several others watching her interaction with the members of the opposite sex, it was, to put it bluntly, annoying. It looked too easy for her. And why was that? Because it was too easy for her. She was beautiful, confident, (rather intimidating)—just—unconventional, would be the correct word. She dismissed most men, as fawning really wasn't her thing.

But it was truly fine. People were jealous of her and, whether she was aware of it or not, she never did much about it. If they glared, _fine, _glare till you get beautiful, frowny wrinkles. If they came up and said 'hey bitch', okay, she may or may not have to pop them in face. But usually she left well enough alone. Shejust wanted them to be _aware_ that she could demolish them if provoked. Oh, how she wished someone would provoke her today.

As she finished her lipstick, she rubbed her lips together then pursed them out. After a kiss to the air, (actually, it was in the general direction of a group of lovely boys—purposeful?) as if to test out the newfound gloss on her lips, she was just about ready to go. She could have sworn she heard one say her lips looked nice. But just in case she didn't, there was no acknowledgment on her part. If she were wrong, that would just be embarrassing.

Why was the world such a predictable, yet perversely entertaining, place? She pondered this after she had snuck a look at the group. Oh, yes, she definitely didn't imagine the comment. Nice drool, she wanted to say. One, who she noticed was particularly attractive, threw a charming smile her way. Eh, swing and a miss.

She smiled (to herself, though). She thought it ridiculous how much she could influence certain people one way, then others in such a dramatically different way. Maybe she was just unusual like that, she considered with a sigh. Sometimes it proved to be an advantage, but other times it was really more of a hindrance to her life in general. Especially when it confirmed even more that she was _different_.

But no one could ever know just how unique she really was. When one lives in a world where being _different_ is a crime, the only thing that really can be done is hide it with every inch and fiber of one's physical capability. She was pretty damn good at it, basically.

She smoothed down her leather jacket and pulled up her jean pants, as they had fallen slightly down in the most annoying way. Shitty, too-big pants. She licked her finger and tried, with _so_ must effort (seriously, she put a lot of sweat and tears into this) to rub off a diminutive stain on her black shirt; she had drooled some toothpaste on it earlier in the day. Well, she assumed it was from toothpaste. She _hoped_ it was from toothpaste.

While looking down, attending to her current task, a little smudge on her black boots, which had also gone unnoticed until that moment, caught her attention. She bent to down to try and wipe off the blotch. What the _hell_ was with her screwing up all her crap?

Of course that was only, um, about two thirds of the school's population that were mentioned. The other third was easily comprised of her close friends, acquaintances, or people who looked up to her. She was kind of a take-no-shit kind of girl. For some reason, people seemed to like that. She supposed she could be considered… well known, as everyone in the school did have an inclination as to who she was… but not popular, never popular. People who were considered _that_ always seemed to be the useless shells of shells of these—_things—_that wished they were people who all dressed the same and talked about nothing _all of the effing time_. And it was very, extremely, tremendously, insanely, without a doubt _im-_freaking­-_portant­ _to her, that she never became anything close to resembling, thinking, or acting as such. Did she believe in stereotypes yet demand no one put her in one? Why, yes. That sounds about right. Was she a hypocrite? No, no she was not.

Okay. Whatever.

It didn't matter who did what and why. The only thing she cared for was that no one messed with her or her friends and she would, in turn, cause no havoc in the lives of others. It was a very simple equation, actually. It was not as though she went around _looking_ for someone to fight with. As far as she was concerned the less fighting she did at school, the better. Her philosophy was that the less she screwed around, the lesser possibility of her _ability_ being found out.

Which meant: The less chance of people finding out she was _different_ (that's what people with abilities like hers were called—she found it rather fitting in an obvious way), the less chance of her having to single handedly fight hundreds of keepers (guys in charge of finding and taking care of _different_ people), and the less chance of her losing, and consequentially being executed and/or caged up and/or exiled. Which, truth be told, did not sound appealing to her in the least.

And this philosophy worked just fine. She was just so _bored_; everyone at school pretty much left her alone if they had a bone to pick (out of fear of getting their asses kicked to the moon). She supposed most of these people had a good sense of self preservation. When screwed with, Kagome didn't particularly know the meaning of hesitate.

Well, _almost_ everyone. Everyone except for _him_. He was a different story though. He was strong. And a _bastard_. There was no getting around that. Either of those.

She gave up trying to remove the smudge, resisting the urge to admit it was a scuff. "Damn it," she mumbled. She was in a deep seeded debate with herself over whether or not she should give it another go—but, oh no. What's this? Her movement ceased completely, muscles tensed.

She knew he was coming from ten yards away. She could _feel_ his eyes watching her as well as his steps on the ground as he closed the gap between them. Though she couldn't see him, her gaze still facing the floor, she knew he was standing right in front of her. She cursed the hairs on her arms, willing them to chill the fuck out.

"Well, speak of the devil," she said lowly. She was pretty aware he'd heard her, though she wasn't sure whether not she intended him to. She started to come up to straight standing position and almost bumped the top of her head on his chin. Hey, please, get a little closer. No, really, I _want_ you to. She hadn't expected him to be _right there_. A mouth full of hair, lovely, that's what she'd always wanted (no, that didn't actually happen; moral of the story was that he was close enough for his hair to weirdly tickle her face). Never mind that is was gorgeous, silky, and long. Enough to make her jealous of it—she decided when she met this boy it should be a rule that men couldn't have prettier hair then women. _Asshole_.

There had to have only been two inches of space between them. Kagome really wanted to know what the hell he wanted. What was wrong with him? Standing in front of her like that without any motive. He should have given up on the whole intimidation thing, like, three years ago. What the fuck, she wanted to scream. Just his presence did a number on her nerves. It always did—pretty dangerous.

After about fifteen seconds of no noise or movement or speech she decided to talk, pushing the thoughts of a possible blow to her pride out of her mind, "Can I help you, Inuyasha?" Of course she was nowhere close to any sort of semblance of serious. She'd never do anything accommodating for this boy if she could possibly help it. And from the sound of the edge in her voice, he was probably, pretty conscious of it.

Ugh. _Inuyasha_.

He continued to stare with an added touch of this annoying, _fucking _foot tapping, "You can get the hell out of my way, is what you can do, Kagome." He eyed her with this cocky smirk (that, in all seriousness, just made her want to punch him in the face) and continued to play along with her little game of pretend, "That'd be a great help. Thanks." He had this—_triumphant _tone (ugh!)—as he attempted to push her to the side. He was, in no way, actually expecting her to move willingly; he just thought a good old college try might prove useful.

Of course she didn't budge as she forced his hand off her shoulder, "Oh, I'm sorry, Inuyasha, did you want me to move?" She moved even closer to his face, successfully proving her point of 'you wanna go, bitch?' "Would you like me to kiss your ass on the way out the doggy door too?" A smirk appeared on her face as the one on his wiped off, turning into a supreme, aggravated scowl.

"You're standing in front of my locker," he said through gritted teeth. _His_ locker? How frustratingly ironic.

Kagome could tell he was trying to keep his cool. Maybe he didn't feel like fighting today. That was probably a good thing, because neither did she. She had wanted something interesting. Just not with him. For the first time since the school year began, she was about to just walk away.

That is, before he ruined her good mood with a vulgar, "So will you just get out of my fucking way, bitch?" _Damn. Him. _All thoughts of leaving the potential fight had left her mind. She fumed as she turned to glare at him, ready to either receive the first blow, or give it. Did he really think that was a good idea? There was no way in all hell she was going to move for him _now_.

He moved his face even closer to her, if that was even humanly possible. Their bodies were touching— their noses were only a centimeter apart. She dropped her stiff fighting stance and gave into a looser, but still alert position. She felt her hands begin the insufferable process of clamming up.

She mentally cursed them. _Really?_ After all these years was he still trying to make her nervous? And _really, _it was actually working?

His face moved even closer to her and her eyes widened, as she was almost sure he was going to make contact. What in the _world_? A kiss_—_how the _hell_ was that going to solve anything! Kagome sharply in took a breath as she felt her knees buckle beneath her. He smiled (well, no, it was definitely a smirk, the arrogant kind) and he swerved his face away (at the last _very _last_, _freakingsecond). His mouth landed near her ear, "So what's it gonna be, babe? You gonna obey me like a good little wench? Or do I need to screw up that pretty, red-lipsticked face a yours?" He breathed it all into her ear, tickling her kind of. She could feel his proud grin in the air.

She bristled. He was _playing_ with her! How dare he fucking play with her like that?

Well if he thought he'd hit a soft spot, then damn him, so would she.

She giggled slightly (she didn't even know she _could_ giggle off command), just supple enough that she knew only he could hear her. She put her hands on his stomach ever so softly and slowly, agonizingly moved them to his upper body. As she lightly tapped her fingers on his chest she looked up and smiled. It was true, very convincing, and she wanted to laugh so, _so _hard at how fiercely he tried (oh, the failure) to hide his bewildered expression. She bit the side of her lip, forcing down butterflies that threatened to escape at their closeness, and the way he looked at her.

She watched his eyes move down to her lip, captured between her teeth, then slowly progress back up to her eyes. She didn't blink—not once—as to not break the trance she had formed between them. Was even she caught in this daze? No, she decided, she would not be.

She rose to her tiptoes and brought her lips to his ear. She made sure their cheeks were lightly touching and she noticed, for a moment, his face, and the softness. Fuck him and his beautiful, girly hair and his flawless, girly face. She was touching his ear and she felt the electricity move through his cheek, the warmer it became (she hoped he was very, very uncomfortable). She made no movement to say anything; she just stood there with her hot breath making its way onto the side of his face.

Your turn to be nervous, fucktard.

"Make me…" she whispered and kissed his ear ever so lightly (she almost couldn't believe her own boldness). She chuckled, this time, for real; not because of her ploy, but at the massive shudder he was, quite visibly, trying to suppress.

Make him squirm.

Wait…

Not yet.

Now.

"…Elf…" She pulled her face back to look at him with hands still on his chest. His breath caught in his throat and he found himself rendered rather paralyzed for a second or two. Enlarged eyes were all Kagome was staring at during that moment of intense scrutiny.

Oh, just wonderful. Perfect, even.

That was a spot not to be hit by far. Just know this: Kagome wasn't the only _different_ person at her school. Inuyasha was one as well. And rather unlucky for him, he was born with characteristics that distinguished him from the normal people. She didn't know what his ability was, for he wouldn't be stupid (retarded) enough to use it at school. But what could be seen were his ears, clearly abnormal as they were—they appeared elfin, pointed, and something she would have seen in a movie. She imagined he had heightened senses. She did as well, but only slightly; it just came in the package when you were _different_.

Something that baffled her, though, were his nails. They weren't normal nails, they were more like _claws_. Oh, she imagined being swiped by those claws, and her heart being ripped in half. She wondered if they had something to with his ability. Kagome had to admit she was curious to see what he could do.

Sure, she was putting herself in danger (her curiosity sorely out matched her need to preserve her safety) by hinting she could see his hidden characteristics, for only _different_ people could see through the tools people like Inuyasha used for concealment. And it was a dead giveaway that she was _different_ as well. But why, in the name of Satan below and God above, did it _have _to matter so much? It was not as though he would expose her secret when she knew his. What kind of idiot would risk getting caught by the government out of spite for another person? No horrible black bags for her, thank you.

She took a glance at his necklace. She wondered if that rosary was what tethered his appearance to come across as normal. She also wondered what would happen is she took it off… That was certainly something that could be used to her advantage. She couldn't ever remember seeing him without that thing on.

Inuyasha, apparently, had caught hold of his senses, because he decided to make a rather sloppy attempt at kicking her legs out from underneath her.

"Too slow!" Kagome smiled and jumped over his leg as it swung under her body. She pushed him back against the lockers on the other side of the hall in the same fluid motion as the bound. (It was easy for her plan to be put into motion, as her hands were still on his chest from the beginning.)

He was flung back by the force of her unexpected brute strength and collided with the lockers on the opposing side of the hall. He heard a number of students gasp and a few, unsuspecting females even scream. But no one _actually_ cared, that much he knew. This was standard procedure for the two of them. This happened every day, one way or another. He hated her, and she hated him. That was just the way it was. Neither of them really wanted to change either part of it.

But never before had she called him Elf. Maybe jackass…jerk off… bastard… But never in a million names had she called him _Elf. _First off, what a stupid fucking thing to call someone. But then again, he didn't really think she meant it as something offensive. She meant to tell him _I know something you don't know, now, what the hell are you gonna do about it? _How could she know? How could she _see_?So many thoughts, all equally laden with a fair amount of confusion, spun around and around in his head as he picked himself up.

He posed himself into a fighting stance. Did this mean that Kagome, his most worthy opponent, was _different_? It would explain a lot—she was indeed very strong for a girl. Almost too strong. But never in a million years had he thought that she might be _different_. He couldn't stop himself from wondering what her ability was.

He shook his head. He was getting way ahead of himself. There was no way she had an ability. He was certain that other than himself (and his brother, the asshole) there were almost no _different_ people. (Other than a few unkempt street rats and maybe a few gang members throughout the city that had not already had a black bag forced over their faces.)

He was lucky. Very, _very_ lucky.

Almost all _different_ people were taken by the keepers. There were very few of them left, much to the government and the humans' _happiness_. They were so afraid of people with abilities whom they deemed menaces to society. The fact that they were simply stronger than everyone else made the general public want to kill them all. And it made him utterly sick. Humans. They decide to destroy all they don't understand.

There was no way a girl like Kagome could get into this high school with an ability without getting black bagged, what with all of the blood tests and background checks… She would have to be insanely crafty and smart to avoid all of that. And there was absolutely no way he was going to give her as much credit as he gave himself for getting into this facility by avoiding all that junk. He wasn't saying that he thought her dumb, per se—or—maybe—actually yes, that's what he was saying.

It was just a lucky pick of names, he decided. She must have run out, so went with Elf. She knows nothing, she sees nothing, it meant nothing, _she_ is nothing special.

Just a girl. Just a _normal_, kickass girl.

He commanded himself back into reality and was met with Kagome (_infuriatingly_) staring at him with a bemused expression, "What's the matter, Inuyasha? Elf got your tongue?" He tried to stop a threateningly visible flinch, but it was proving rather difficult. He was really having some trouble. What was she getting at anyway? "Well, please, allow me to get him off for you." She ran at him with full force and punched him square in the face. Why he hadn't dodged the blatant attack was beyond her; it was actually a rather sloppy and straight forward move on her part.

Everyone could hear it. The sound of past paced flesh on flesh rang through the circle of people that had finally surrounded them (as they did every day). But today—it was different—why was it different? Inuyasha seemed to be rather of his game.

He bent down and cradled his bleeding cheek, "Damn it!" _Man_ that bitch hit hard…

Kagome bent down as well, to look at him, "Tsk tsk tsk, Inuyasha, that really doesn't look good. Maybe you should get that checked?" Following her snide remark, she stood up and placed her hands on his shoulders, and before he could even hope to react, jammed her knee into his stomach with such an amount of vigor that it sent him soaring a considerable distance backwards. He landed with a hard and loud bang! on a whole new bunch of lockers which, she cringed, now had a wonderful, lovely dent the shape of Inuyasha's ass. She hoped to her God in heaven the school wouldn't make her pay for that.

Kagome slowly walked over to the heap on the floor, which was now supposed to be some sort of interesting representation of Inuyasha. He was holding his stomach and gasping for breath on both knees, bending down over the floor (his other hand was used to prop himself up). Damn it. What the _hell_ was wrong with him? He coughed up a little blood; everyone around cringed as it splatted onto the floor. She had never even come _close _to inflicting this type of damage on him before. What the fuck was her motivation on today of all days?

He could feel the vibrations of her feet against the floor. She was coming, and he knew there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. He tried to inwardly yell, to make himself come on, to stand up and be a man. To not let Kagome continue making the world's _largest_ dick out of him. He shook his head. What. She. Said. Meant. Nothing. _Damn it_.

She stopped in front of him and knelt down, again. It was all so perfect, and so _easy_, Kagome considered it all as she stared at him. She knew she threw him a curve ball. She knew he was confused which resulted in his current, shitty-ass fighting and _man_, it was all so effortless, so uncomplicated! One word. _Elf._

"What's the matter with you, Inuyasha?" She grabbed his chin in her hand and smiled a large, hearty smile (it wasn't really all that needed). She moved closely to his face and rose in eyebrow, "Is it something I said?"

One beat. One unguarded beat. That's all he needed to turn this fight around.

She brought up her arm to block—not nearly quick enough, though—to stop Inuyasha's fist as it flew toward her face.

It wasn't enough to send her flying back, but she'd be damned if that wasn't one of the most painful places to be hit. She hated being struck in the face.

She made the mistake, again (well _excuse_ her for being disorientated for a second after getting punched in the face), as she was forced to the ground with Inuyasha's arms and legs on top of hers, pinning her down. "Well there you are, Inuyasha! I was beginning to think we lost you for a second!" she chided, while struggling under his body weight.

Her eyes went wide as a fist soared toward her face again. And then another. "I find it funny how you try to make jokes even though you're clearly losing, Kagome." Her vision was starting to turn fuzzy; actually, there seemed to be more than one Inuyasha looming overhead. She was fairly sure there was supposed to be only one—oh, this could spell badness for her. Though she was seriously feeling it, she would never show him when she was weak.

"Oh really, Inuyasha? Is that what you call this? Kagome losing? Because I call this—" She had no time to finish as _another_ angry fist came at her.

He'd be damned if he let this bitch make him look like an ass in front of all these people. Their fights had never gone this far before. There would be a push or two, possibly a punch or a slap (she had kneed him in the balls a couple times). But Kagome had gone farther than ever before. And hell would sooner freeze over before he would let her win in a real fight like this.

Oh, what a horrible situation. She _tried_ to not do it, really, she did. She found herself pretty powerless over her own self, though, as she lifted her hands in front of her face, slapped them together, and closed her eyes for a brief moment, concentrating. She waited, one second, that's all. She then slammed her hands onto the floor on either side of her, the ground beneath them shooting up about a foot and then back down (as if nothing had happened at all—it was a fraction of a second).

Inuyasha flew off her on account of the momentum of the moving ground. It was very quick, and she hoped with everything she had that no one had seen it. It was possible, she thought, that every person could have blinked at that exact moment (or if not, just thought they were seeing things?)

See, now _this_ was why she liked to avoid fights at school. Sometimes her body reacted on its own and used its ability whether Kagome had a say in it or not. She had grown much _better_ at controlling it, that was for damn sure, but obviously not good enough if things like this still decided to happen.

She staggered up before Inuyasha could pounce on her again, though he clearly wasn't going to make any move to. He just kind of sat there blinking and looking around as if trying to find the source of all this weirdness. People didn't _usually_ just fly off their opponents like that, did they?

Well. At least he was completely clueless. Kagome was relieved as she slowly walked over to him.

Her leisurely stroll was unfortunately cut rather short as the battered boy in front of her pushed himself up. He looked her straight in the eye, "Kagome. What the hell was—" He stopped at the feeling of Kagome's foot connecting with his nuts. She had no more time for him today.

He slid to the ground. "_That's_ what the hell that was, you jackass."

She grabbed her school bag, found somewhere in the mass of people, and slung it over her shoulder. She stood up straight (even though it sent a whirlwind of shooting pain to every part of her body); she wouldn't show anyone the weakness that threatened to overtake her.

Every student parted to let Kagome through, their loud cheering in the face of her fight now a stony, cold silence. She walked with her head held high, as it always was without faltering, straight out the doors of the school without saying another word about it.

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**Oh, I forgot to mention Inuyasha's lack of dog ears. He is a full demon in this story. So, no dog ears for him. He has the elfin ones just like his older brother.**

**Mmkay, all done! Hope you liked it. Review, please, if you would? Thank you all and to all have a good night.**


	2. Pain

**Here you go. Chapter 2. sorry it took so long guys, but I'm unbelievable busy right now. I hardly have time to SLEEP! Well anyway. Here you go! Sorry if you're a little bored now, there's gonna be fluff an action later don't worry, I just really want you guys to understand the angle at which I'm coming from in this story. If you have suggestions and want to tell me, feel free, I'm all ears.  


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Kagome walked down the street,_ "Damn that was close," _she remembered when she brought out her ability as she wiped the blood from her forehead with the back of her hand, _"Almost _too _close." _

She shuddered as she thought of what would have happened if she had made it a little more evident…and people noticed she briefly changed the molecules of the ground. She was good at controlling it, which was why it was so fast, but obviously not good enough, or it wouldn't have acted on it's own accord.

She came to her apartment; almost sure her best friend in the entire world, Sango, would be there. Sango hated school, but was ironically really very smart. She went to high school only half the time. And the other half stayed home doing college prep courses online, which was why she was always at Kagome's apartment.

Kagome had a computer, Sango didn't. She couldn't afford one. And neither could Kagome really. Her computer was ancient…after she ran away from home and from that bitch (a.k.a. her sister, Kikyo) she went back and took all of the old crap from her room right form under Kikyo's nose.

For a while, Kagome had become a professional street rat, pro at stealing things. She still was a pro of course, she just preferred not to know that she was the legal age to get a job so she could support herself in this dirt poor neighbor hood she called home.

She was lucky to find a job that didn't require a blood test. _Different abilities_ showed up in your blood, and once they see that blood test…you are black bagged on the spot without even a question. _"That's how much they hate people like me and Inuyasha…"_ She sighed, and then mentally cursed herself for putting Inuyasha in even the same sentence as her without having the word hate in there somewhere. But as much as she hated to admit it, they both _belonged_ in the same sentence. Really, they were one in the same, fighting for the same things, running from the same things.

But that's why they could never get along; they were too much alike in some ways, and too different in others. It was always to an extreme, this that or the other thing. Their personalities just collided, _"And this is why we will never get along…"_ She stopped her thoughts as she approached the front door.

She looked for the key in her bag, she didn't want to disturb Sango if she was neck deep in some sort of study thing by knocking, she was sure she'd get her ass kicked. Sango was just like that, kickass.

She and Sango would often spar. And since she didn't know about Kagome's _ability_ (Kagome felt so horrible about not telling her best friend…but she couldn't trust anyone with this. She never really knew how Sango would react), they would just do hand to hand instead. Kagome almost always lost without her _different_ strength.

Messing with Sango was not the way to go…she was just so strong. Sometimes Kagome couldn't even believe it.

She opened the door to find Sango sitting on the moth-hole-ridden couch watching the small TV that Kagome once stole in her days of being a street rat. "Hey whore what's shakin' my friend?" Sango didn't look up from the TV once as she just sat there lazily.

Kagome gaped at her friend from the other side of the room, "Dude what the hell are doing?" Kagome walked up to her friend but still wasn't looked at. So she walked in front of the TV, "You know as well as I do that you have a fatty college midterm the size of fucking sin you have to study for," she knew she was acting like an annoying nagging mother, but just because her different ability prevented her from going anywhere with her life didn't mean that Sango should just abandon the great future that Kagome knew she had.

Sango stood up and looked at Kagome somewhat irritatedly, "Hey Kagome come on I was watch—" Sango opened her mouth a little bit like she was planning to say something, but then closed it again as she surveyed the entirety of her friend. "So uhmm…you gonna tell me what the hell happened to you?" Kagome sat on the couch and sighed at her best friend's question.

Sango went to the bathroom and Kagome could here the water running. She came back with a washcloth, sat next to her, and started to wipe the dry blood from her face. "It was Inuyasha huh?"

"Yup. Just like everyday…" Another sigh.

"Frenchy, this isn't like everyday, you've never come home this bad before," Sango used Kagome's nickname, Frenchy. She had started calling her that way back when she developed her red lipstick fetish. It reminded her of a French harlot. The end. "You must've really pissed him off, babe."

"Well I _did_ make him look like the biggest ass, Sanny, you don't even know it was beautiful. I threw him a real curveball. Totally confused him, fighting was shit, and I totally kicked his ass to the moon and back. But then he regained his senses and gave me just as bad of treatment," She laughed at remembering the events of earlier in the day. Sango wiped the rag over a soar spot on Kagome's face where Inuyasha's fist connected one too many times. Kagome jumped up, "Ow! Fuck Sanny! What are you trying to do?" She screeched as she cradled her pounding cheek in her hands.

Sango chuckled slightly, "Sorry, Frenchy but that thing is crusty. I gotta get that junk off before you get some sort of odd infectious disease thinger, ya know?"

Kagome reluctantly sat down on the couch once again and allowed Sango to clean off the dried blood as piercing pain went through the entirety of her face. She found it unfair that wounds like this hurt more after they were inflicted than actually during.

She kept her eyes shut for the rest of the grueling, painful time purely being fueled by one thought, _"Holy damn I hate that fucking boy."  


* * *

_

Kagome looked out the window in the bedroom and inspected the street below. There weren't many people, she noticed.

This was to be expected though, when you lived in the part of town that she did, you learned not to wonder around aimlessly on the streets with no purpose for to long. If the slime ball thugs where to notice you had nowhere to be, they figured no one would miss you.

Easy target.

She could see the top of her friend Miroku's apartment building about a half a mile away. Miroku was a nice boy who happened to be Sango's boyfriend of God knows how long. Kagome was convinced that they were completely in love.

She adored Miroku and almost everything about him, but honestly, his hands could wander. She always happened to find them in a place they should not be. Possibly inching toward Sango's backside in a public place… or even toward her own. He didn't mean anything by it, but it really was something he needed to work on.

Seriously.

Kagome didn't understand how Sango could just ignore it and pretend like it didn't happen…every five minutes. But if Sango could live with it, then so could she, if not for Sango, then for her sanity.

She surveyed the scene before her a little more as she cradled her still burning cheek. Sango had only but twenty minutes before tried to scrape off the slowly drying blood from her bruised face; looking out the window gave her something to focus on other than the pain that insignificant, arrogant, egotistical jerk-off, Inuyasha, had been the cause of earlier in the day.

"_Damn that guy…" _Kagome thought in her head clenching her fists. She didn't even really quite remember why they hated each other in the first place, but as far back as she could remember they had been fighting.

Interesting…

Kagome had always thought that she had a step up from him because she knew that he was _different_ when he had no idea that she was. Of course, now that she thought about it…it wasn't really a step up unless he _knew_ that she knew something that he didn't know.

Or something.

Well…_actually…_

He probably did know _now_ because of that damn episode they played in the halls earlier. She had to admit that that had been the farthest they had gone _ever_ a far as the seriousness of their fights had been concerned. And that had to be pretty damn serious for her ability to think she was in such a desperate situation for it to react on its own without her approval.

Today had kind of shined their relationship in a whole new light for her. She didn't completely understand why, but Kagome had never really, truly,_ completely_ hated Inuyasha.

You know…

She thought it was kind of one of those grade school things where the little six year old kids fight over who can draw inside the lines better. But then when it was time for recess they completely forgot why it was that they had been fighting only five minutes earlier, that is, until it was coloring time again. In which case the whole scenario would repeat itself once again, unbeknownst to those caught in the looping circle, but _completely_ evident to those on the sidelines merely looking in the glass and giggling at the stupidity of theirs pears.

Kagome briefly thought about this. Then furrowed her eyebrows and squinted her eyes at nothing in particular as she contemplated a little bit more. Oh yes, brainpower was needed for this one.

Mhmm, she could definitely, without a doubt, _definitely_ color inside the lines better than Inuyasha.

But that was _not_ the point…as true as it may be.

Still though, she mentally congratulated herself on anything and everything she could so better than the stuck up, mean, stupid, _stupid, STUPID,_ jackass in question.

Seriously now… why did she hate him so much? It would really help if she could remember what event triggered it all. Better yet… why did he hate _her_ so much?

At that thought, she stiffened considerably. She looked like someone was trying to tell her the meaning of life, but she couldn't understand one fucking word that came out of his over educated mouth.

She was _insulted._

She just stayed in that position for a couple of seconds, completely dumbfounded at the fact the she was offended.

_Offended?_

_Offended!_

She just realized how much it truly pissed her off that he hated her, yet she didn't even remember why. _Sure_ she hated him too, but still, that wasn't the point.

Same facial expression still plastered across her face, she remembered all of the times he had been totally sweet to someone in the hall who had dropped her books on accident. He _always _helped to pick them up, not kick them out of the way and laugh like he would have done with her. Or all the times she saw him smiling with _his_ crowd of people, totally passive and happily light-hearted from everything around him, until his eyes would lay on hers and his cheering smile would turn into that famous smirk-ish scowl thinger that he did whenever he looked at her.

_Shit._

He really, _really_ hated her didn't he?

But _whyyyyyyyyy_ damn it!

What could she have possibly done to get moved to such a horrible part of his bad side? And better yet… why was it bothering her _now_ of all the times she'd fought with him before?

She'd figured maybe it was because he had inflicted actual damage on her this time… not that it really mattered. She could just heal herself if she wanted to. She would normally refrain from that though.

It hurt like shit.

Though it took her awhile to fully understand the aspects of her abilities, that was a little catch she had learned earlier on. It seemed to Kagome, from what she had witnessed from herself and other people that had were _different_ such as herself, along with their one major power was a little sub-division of it. Or at least that's what she called it.

Inuyasha had his ability, not that she knew what it was, but from watching him and observing his behavior, she learned that his sub-abilities were that of incredibly increased senses and physical endurance.

A.K.A… he could smell better, see farther, hear softer, run faster, jump higher… and along with that he was extremely strong. "Not too bad a sub-ability if I do say so myself," she said allowed as she remembered the times she had seen him sniff the air.

True, it had been rather weird, and she had been about to confront him and laugh at his weird and rather interesting habit. But she had thought better of it when her brain decided to kick in and she realized that his weird fuzzy ears and his smelling random things went hand in hand.

She had also figured out the strength thing from fighting him on a daily basis. Of course being _different _at all made you much stronger than before.

But _damn…_

He was really freaking strong.

But then again her sub-ability wasn't too bad itself. It was actually pretty useful to have at times. But there was _always_ a catch to a sub-division of normal abilities. Inuyasha didn't have her fooled; she saw how tired he would become after intensely fighting with his sub-abilitied strength.

She imagined that after over exerting his body so much into using more strength and agility than a normal body could withstand, it would kind of shut down, restoring the power that was lost in the moment.

She briefly wondered how long he could fight using his sub-abilities' strength until it shut down. And better yet… when it shut down did he actually pass out like her? Would his body actually not have enough energy to sustain consciousness? What would happen to him if his body decided to store up on some energy _while_ he was in a fight? Could he control it? Or would it just overtake him completely?

There were so many questions pertaining to Inuyasha. She had to admit that she found him rather fascinating, seeing as how he was the only other _different_ person she knew other than herself and Koga, her boyfriend of six months.

She had to wonder why she had screwed it up with him in the first place. What would her life be like if she and Inuyasha were actually, God forbid, _friends?_ She imagined it would have been nice to have someone at her school that could watch her back in case of emergency.

Of course she had many friends there, all equally tough as Kagome herself, but not nearly as strong. Not by any means.

She attempted to lay her head in her hand as she pondered all the questions running around in her head, only to pick it up as quick as she had put it down, hissing in pain. She had touched the gash across her face, which she had noticed now, was still bleeding. Her mind flickered to Sango and horrid experience of the blood scraping. She recoiled at the though of that happening again.

As tough as she may have been, she definitely did not have the highest tolerance for pain in the world. She was overly exasperated with the fact that her face hurt her so intensely. And even more so with the fact that it had been Inuyasha who was the cause of it all.

Fucking _Inuyasha._

_This _was why she hated him so much. He was a hard-headed, egotistical, moronic, ass-licking cunt that she hated so fucking much she _drown _in it! _He _had been the cause of her misery for three years._ He_ had been the reason why she'd go home in a bad mood everyday. _He_, had been the fucking _one_, who played that damn practical joke on her in the first place!

Oh.

_Oh…_

She remembered now. Freshman year. That _joke_ he'd played. Hardly a joke in her opinion. It was cruel. No if, ands, or buts about it. She'd fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker. There was nothing she could do about it, she _hated _him after that. He had tried to say he was sorry, but her ears were closed to anything out of his mouth.

She starred blankly at the window, completely lost in her thoughts. How could she have forgotten that ever so _minor_ detail? She had completely blocked it from her mind, refusing to dwell on such trivial things as emotional sorrow. But now she remembered. And everything was clear.

That's why he hated her. Because she hated him. It had always been like that, and always would.

Her eyes started to water and she got a little dizzy. She had been starring out the window for so long as she was lost in her thoughts; she had forgotten completely that breathing and blinking were part of _existence_ for her species. She blinked a few times and took some big breaths, snapping back into reality little by little.

But with reality, also came the physical pain that the jackass-who-shall-not-be-mentioned had caused earlier. She cringed again as she felt the soreness stinging her cheek. She didn't remember ever getting struck on the face as hard as she was that day. And she'd be damned if it would ever _ever_ happen again.

"This is fucking ridiculous," she seethed through clenched teeth.

She brought her hand to her face, breathing heavily with eyes shut. She concentrated, getting ready for the utter pain that was sure to follow. A soft, pink light emitted from her hand and was soon engulfing the gash.

She scrunched her eyes as much as they could possible be closed and pressed her lips together, willing herself not to scream as the natural healing process of a human flesh wound was being greatly altered and hastened by Kagome's touch. She was significantly disturbing the natural order of things; therefore it would only be right for her to get a consequence in return.

But this…_this_ was just not fair.

She couldn't be brave anymore. Two things Kagome had none of was patience endurance. She couldn't withstand pretty much anything even remotely uncomfortable for too long. She couldn't help but let sounds of pain escape her lips.

She couldn't help but to move around, being still was not an option. She stood up and ran over to a wall to brace herself as she felt her knees give out beneath her. Beads of sweat formed at her hairline as she dropped to her knees, not letting her face hit the ground, but instead saving herself with her palms as they crashed into the floor.

The thing about her healing herself was that once the process had begun, it could not be stopped. This was more or less her form of Inuyasha's over-exertion thing that happened with him and his strength. After this, if the pain didn't make her pass out first, it was likely she wouldn't stay conscious for very long.

She bit back a scream.

Not.

Fucking.

Cool.

She hated the damn pain that came with her stupid sub-ability. She bet _Inuyasha_ didn't get pain when he used _his._ She just couldn't stand the thought of suffering on account of him. If she was going to be hurting, it was going to be because of _her. _He wasn't _allowed_ to hurt her anymore.

She'd decided.

She could feel consciousness slipping away and willed herself to stay awake. Of course she was failing miserably, but after ineffective trying, she welcomed it. At least if she was asleep, she couldn't feel the pain anymore right?

She mentally cursed herself for being such a baby. This was _nothing_. She had once had to heel a gunshot wound to her chest. It was not her first choice, but if she didn't do it, she would have died. The healing was terrible. It was the most horrible experience she had ever had to endure.

She didn't wake up for days.

With that thought, her body collapsed and fell the remaining way to the floor.

* * *

**Hey. Well alrighty then. Chapter 2 complete, and I really hoped you liked it! Review, please, as it makes me wonderfully excited whenever I get a new one. Okay, have a good night or day. Byebye.**


	3. Disease

Well there you go my friends :0) enjoyyyyyyyy!

**Disclaimer: nope.**

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* * *

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"Frenchy?" Kagome could hear Sango's voice calling out to her from a far away place. She tried to look around, but all there was to see was black. Lots and lots of black. But where was Sango? Where was _she_? A tunnel? Tunnels are black. Was Sango calling her from the end of it?

What the _hell_ was she doing in a tunnel?

"Frenchy!"

"_I want to get out!_" She attempted to scream. She tried to open her mouth, but it was as difficult as picking up two tons of bricks. She felt her shoulders being shaken…and truth be told, it was pissing her off. So apparently Sanny was there with her, then why couldn't she see her? She wouldn't have loved anything more than to wake up at that moment and slap Sango in the face. There was nothing more irritating to her than being shook.

But Sanny had beet her to it, she vaguely felt her best friend's hand connect with her face. "Damn in Kagome! Get the hell up! You're scaring the shit outta me!" Ooooooh how Sango was going to get it later for that one. Her face was still totally achy. And being slapped definitely didn't make it feel any better.

Still though, she would have loved to open her eyes at that moment and ease her friend's terror, but that was not going to be the case. She realized where she was and why, now, and she understood and accepted that her body needed a little more time to regain it's lost energy.

But _damn,_ that cut had better fucking be gone by the time she woke up.

* * *

Sango was watching TV on Kagome's moth-hole ridden couch. Sure Frenchy was gonna be all over her ass until she studied for that damn midterm that was waiting for her, but whatever. Kagome was too pissed about her bleeding face and Inuyasha to focus on her at the moment, and she knew it.

So she might as well use the free time to her advantage, right?

She walked over to the small kitchen that the tiny apartment had and put a pot of water on the stove. If she was going to procrastinate, she was going to do it on a full stomach. She was starring at the water, willing it to start boiling. She figured that if she starred at it long enough, it might become intimidated and heat faster.

Okay well not _really_. She wasn't an idiot or anything, but it was something to do. TV was getting a little too boring for her taste these days.

While half her mind was still focusing in on the slowly heating liquid in front of her, the other half couldn't help but be drawn to the other portion of the apartment in Kagome's room; she could here her best friend doing _something_ or another. What the hell was she doing in there? _Backflips_?

She noticed the first little bubble erupt from the top of the water, "Yes! Score one for Sangooooo!" She chanted in a referee type voice, forgetting Kagome's weirdness completely. "Come on…come on…" Her eyes were pretty much boaring holes into the poor semi-bubbling liquid.

If it wasn't _water_…it might have just burst into flames.

Sango could be pretty intimidating at times.

She got eye level with the pot. She figured that once she counted fifteen more bubbles, that would be boiling _enough_ for her to put the amazing ramen in the amazing water and make the amazing soup that she needed for her amazing procrastination.

"…fourteen…come on… fifteen! YES!" She scrambled up and grabbed the package so fast it was surprising it didn't explode right then and there. She was struggling to open the ramen package; but her nails were too long to grasp the plastic correctly. "Damn iiiiiiiiiit! Just who are they trying to fucking keep out anyway?"

She was completely fed up. She was about to through stupid package across the room, either that or actually go and hunt for scissors. But she didn't have a chance to do either as she dropped the package on the stove and ran toward the back room.

She heard Kagome scream, and there was no better motivation for her to run as fast as she could without a second thought.

She was half expecting to see that Koga had climbed through her window up the fire escape and scared the shit out of her like he often did. That was her _hopeful_ notion.

She burst through the door, definitely not seeing Koga, but Kagome face down on the floor. "Kagome what the hell are you doing? You scared the life outta me just now!" She scolded her friend, "What were you doing? _Gymnastics_ in here? That's what it sounded like from the other room."

There was no movement from the raven-haired girl in front of her. "Frenchy?" Sango walked over to her and studied her still form.

_Oh crap_. What if she really was doing backflips and fell and broke her neck or something? She immediately felt bad for joking about that earlier. She knew that was like a one in a million chance of being the case, but she was still not particularly _comfortable_ with the fact that her best friend in the entire world was unmoving on the ground.

"Frenchy!" She knelt down beside the still girl and turned her over. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn't cold or stiff or anything, so at least she wasn't _dieing_. But this still was seriously not Sango's interpretation of a good situation. Why wouldn't she wake fucking _up? _How was she supposed to get a response?

She really had no idea, so she imitated what she saw in movies. She backhanded her across the face. "Damn in Kagome! Get the hell up! You're scaring the shit outta me!" There was still no movement. She grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hoping to dear _God_ it would get some sort of reaction out of her.

Nothing.

She gently set Kagome down after her fruitless efforts at waking the unconscious girl. She sat down and bit her lip. Sango was definitely _not_ going to let panic over take her. "Kagome, what the hell did you do that could have caused this?"

But then it hit her.

_Duh._

Alright… it was going to be okay… she just needed to get it as fast as possible.

With that thought she sprung up and ran out of the room. She had to get the antibiotics for Kagome before this situation turned into something more than just no consciousness. Of course the fact that she saw a considerable amount of smoke coming from the direction of the kitchen wasn't exactly helping to calm her nerves at all. "What the _fuck?_"

She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw the stove totally in flames. It seems that when she dropped the plastic bag full of ramen when she ran to be at Kagome's aid, she had dropped it a little too closely to the stove's hot burner… and plastic plus heat definitely doesn't equal happy if that's what you were hoping for.

To top everything off, the ever so _helpful_ smoke detector started making a noise that made Sango wanna tear her hair out. "Thanks a _lot_ you stupid thing, as if I wasn't neck deep in smoke already!"

Okay let's way our options… you best friend is practically in a coma, the house is on fire, and you wanna shoot yourself in the face because of an ear shattering noise… but it's still possible to be calm…or… _sane_ right?

_Right?_

Yes. Definitely.

"Shit! Where the hell's the fucking fire extinguisher? Damn it!" She ran out of the apartment and ran down the hall. Even though this was pretty much just a crappy all around apartment building, there still had to be a fire extinguisher somewhere right? Weren't there laws about that kind of thing?

She ran down the hall and turned a corner, then another corner.

Still no extinguisher.

It dawned on Sango how dumb it was of her that she had moved into this apartment having no idea where the fire extinguisher was… "Come one… fire extinguisher…fire extinguisher…" She said to herself as she was rounding the corners. "Yes! Yes yes yes yessssss!"

The moment of truth.

She hit the glass with her elbow and it crumbled to the ground. She grabbed the extinguisher and ran as fast as she could back to Kagome's apartment. She bolted threw the door and into the kitchen. "Take this you son of a bitch!" With that she put her hand on the trigger of the extinguisher and the white foam bolted out, covering the quickly growing fire.

After completely drenching her best friend's kitchen, she was sure that every freaking ash of that fire was now out. But she definitely didn't forget the task at hand as threw the extinguishing device aside without a second though as she ran to the cabinet. "Come on Kagome… where did you put it?"

Kagome had a disease called Septicemia. She had it from birth, and it could be fatal if not kept at bay by certain antibiotics. The defination of it is pretty much the presence of bacteria in the blood. It's a serious, life-threatening infection thingy that gets worse very quickly. It can cause infections throughout the body, including infections in the lungs and abdomen if not kept under control by certain medications.

At least that was what Sango had read about it in the medical dictionary.

If it ever were to get to the point where she passed out from lack of meds, Sango was instructed by Kagome to inject her with exactly one fifth of a syringe of a diagnostic called Epinephrine, or an artificial adrenaline. Sango had always wondered why adrenaline had anything to do with an infection of the blood, but she was going to do what she was told, if it would only make Frenchy wake up.

Of course Kagome had different motives by telling Sango to give her Epinephrine when she passed out. It was actually for just sort of an occasion as this, when her sub-ability got the better of her. The artificial adrenaline would give her body the power it needed after the immense energy was used up by using her healing ability. Losing consciousness was actually not a symptom of her Septicemia at all.

When something was wrong, probably on account of not taking her meds when instructed, it would usually begin with spiking fevers and chills, rapid breathing and heart rate, and the outward appearance of being seriously sick. Then she would go into shock with decreased body temperature (hypothermia), adrenal collapse (for which the Epinphrine actually was actually very usefull), confusion or other changes in mental state, and eventually death, if not treated.

It was more or less like a greatly exaggerated case of diabetes. If the injections where not given for a certain period of time, not good things where sure to follow. Because of this fact, she took her meds religiously, almost down to the exact minute when she was supposed to.

Sango really didn't understand why Kagome didn't just go to the hospital and get it treated once and for all; after all, it was a disease that could be fixed with the correct hospital treatments. But every time Sango had suggested this to her friend, she would always get yelled at. So eventually she stopped trying.

Kagome must have really hated hospitals. She just couldn't comprehend why Kagome would rather live like this than just get over her dumb fear and get her ass to the hospital.

There was actually a very simple reason for that. Septicemia was a disease of the _blood_. Which means they would have to take a blood test. And what is in her blood? Evidence of her being _different_. And even though it was a hospital… she was sure they would have no problem sending the blood test straight to the government, along with her name, where she lived and worked, her background information, social security code, family, friends…and anything else they could possible think of.

There would be no escaping after that.

She was not willing to make that kind of mistake. She could live with taking her meds every 24 hours on the dot. What she could _not_ handle was being caged up by the damn government. You could bet they'd never allow her to take her medications in there.

She had no doubt that she would die within days of being taken.

So according to her, this was a fine method. And plus, it wasn't all bad. Because of being cursed with the damn Septicemia, she was introduced to Epinephrine, which works wonders in troubleshooting to system after her sub-ability pretty much destroys it.

Sango had to have thrown six hundred different bottles of crap onto the floor before she final found the stupid Epinephrine injection and the antibiotics Kagome needed. "Jeeze you'd think Frenchy would keep something like that in the fucking front," She said to herself as she went into Kagome's room.

Part of her actually didn't really want to wake her up…cuz when she would see what Sango did to her kitchen…it was not going to be the most pleasant experience of her life.

But she was going to take the high road and be a good, loyal, non-fearing best friend. She took the needle out of the package and squirted out just enough of the fluid for there to be only fifth of the syringe containing liquid.

She picked up Kagome's arm and examined it carefully, searching for just the right spot to insert the needle. "Right there…" She whispered to herself, briefly wondering if it would be life threatening in any way if she accidentally injected the adrenaline into a muscle instead of a vein.

She pushed the needle into Kagome's skin, hoping to her God in heaven it was the correct spot. She the injected in all of the syringes content and then slowly pulled out the needle.

Almost as immediately as she pulled the needle out, Kagome took in a very sharp breath deeply and quickly. She opened her eyes and sat up so fast, she almost collided heads with Sango, who was still worriedly hovering over her.

She continued to breath heavily as her vision started to clear up. The relieved face of Sango started to come into focus. Her heart was pounding and she felt like she wanted to run five hundred laps around a track.

Well, that's what you got when you shoot yourself up and full of adrenaline.

Sango raised her arms and looked as though she was about to give Kagome the biggest hug of her life.

But instead what she got was the biggest slap-across-the-face of her life. Well if she wasn't awake then. She sure was _now._

"Don't you every fucking do that to me again, Frenchy! You scared the life outta me!" She knew Sango meant well, but damn, she really needed to stop slapping her in the face.

"Wow, thanks for your _concern_," she said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

"Anytime, my friend," her best friend of all time said with a smile. Now how could she be mad at someone with an adorable smile like that? "Here is your medication."

She had two pills on her hand that was held out toward Kagome, "But I took them this morning…"

She retracted her hand about half way, "You couldn't have… why would this happened if your Septicemia was under control via the pills? Maybe you just forgot to take them, Frenchy. Here," she said pushing the hand toward Kagome again, "just in case."

Kagome knew she had taken them that morning, but she had no desire to peek Sango's curiosity. "Fine… lemme just go get some water from the kitchen." She started to get up when Sango grabbed her arm.

That dorky smile on her friend's face and that nervous laugh didn't cause _any_ suspicion within Kagome. _Really._

"Actually Kagome…why don't I just get that water for you?"

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**Bare with me k guys? There's more Inuyasha in the next chapter mmkay? Haha just neview plzzzzzzzz? It makes me totally happyyyyyy :0)**

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	4. Love

**Wow so it has really been along time! So just for you, I'm making this chapter extra long. And you get a little bit of assumed background on Kagome. Yea…. Hope you like it!**

**Disclaimer: Nope. SHUT UP. **

"My apartment…my _kitchen…_" Kagome starred dumbfounded at the mess that stood before her.

She didn't say anything more, just stood and starred. Everything was covered in white foam. Her cabinet was practically torn off of its hinges and its contents strewn all over the floor. Her stove was ruined, with a big black spot covering the top, and it looked to her that the burner itself had spontaneously combusted.

Kagome no longer remembered why she felt weak, why she needed meds, or why she was even mad at Sango. All she cared about right now was…

"My kitcheeeeeeeeeeeeen!" She fell to her knees and buried her face in her hands. This meant she was going to have to get everything fixed. And what was required to fix it? _Someone _to fix it. And in order to hire _someone_ to fix it, she needed money. Money of which she did not have.

Sango was hiding around the corner from the bedroom to the living area. She dared to move her body a couple inches around the bend to meat the guilty glare of her friends bowing back. "Frenchy… I—"

She moved.

Sango stopped short and knew well enough to hold her breath, as if that might somehow save her, as Kagome slowly got up from the position she was previously in. Sango noticed the girl's hands were clenched into fists which pretty much stated that no matter how much she runs, Kagome _will_ catch her, no matter how much she fights back, Kagome _will_ kill her, and no matter how much she begs for mercy, Kagome_ won't _listen.

When up, Kagome didn't turn to face her as Sango had previously interpreted, in fact, her hands unclenched and her body actually loosened up. A sighed emitted from her mouth.

"I need a drink."

With that she turned sharply to her left, grabbed her jacket and was out the door in a matter of seconds. Sango took this as an opportunity to stare astonished and the ceiling, and then at the destroyed kitchen. "Interesting reaction…" She said to herself.

Then out the door she ran.

* * *

Sango and Kagome approached the door to Koga's apartment. It was considerably nicer than their own building, with actual fresh painted doors and a buzzer that required someone on the other end to actually let you in. In their own apartment complex, everything was peeling, and anyone who felt like raping and killing them could just walk right in if they felt like it.

Koga often worried about Kagome and begged her to come and live with him as he didn't want just that to happen to her in her own insecure building. She had always denied the offer though, saying she could protect herself just fine.

Its not that she didn't want to live with Koga, she just had a really hard time putting too much dependence on any one person, and rightly so. And plus, she could take care of herself and they both knew it. Koga was one of the only people in the world who knew she was different, other than maybe her sister, wherever the hell she was, and her boss, Kaede.

Oh and also Miroku… but that was definitely just an accident. She had been moving her couch by rearranging the floor instead of breaking her back trying to move the couch herself. Miroku had kinda just walked in… she got better locks on her door after that.

There are probably other people here and there that know, thugs that she fought with and had no choice but to use to her abilities, and probably Inuyasha _now_. But it didn't matter. Koga was different too, and so she had no problem trusting him just as he had no issues with trusting her. Especially after the first time they met, that had to have been the ultimate depth of trust.

_Kagome was walking down the alley as a short cut to Miroku's house. She knew it wasn't a smart idea to take this way, but what could she do? She had to get Sango's anniversary present there before Sango herself appeared, and Sango had left a little before her. Miroku had asked her to keep it in a safe place at her apartment because all Sango did was snoop in every nook and cranny of his house until she found it. She had a hard time letting secrets stay secrets… which was one of the reasons why Kagome was weary about telling Sango she was different. It's not that she didn't trust her best friend in all the earth…she just had no idea what her reaction would be. And what if it was terrible? And Sango had some sort of horrible react—_

_She had no time to finish her thoughts, because in her daze, it seemed that she had walked right into the middle of a fight. And when "in the middle" is mentioned, really. In the freaking middle. She didn't really care that much; she figured if she just kept on walking, no one would really notice she was there._

_No such luck._

_"What the hell?" She screamed as a fist came toward her, rudely interrupted her out of contemplative thoughts. "The was so fucking rude! I'm not even in this damned fight you asshole!" She yelled at the gruff man who had punched her in the first place. It was right smack dab in the middle of her cheek. She _hated_ being struck in the face._

_"It seems you are now, Little Lady," he smirked at her and it really made her wonder what the hell he was so happy about._

_"You know, I would wipe that smile off your face right now if I were you. Well no… keep it if you like, I'm about to seriously hurt you anyway. Rule of thumb, my friend, no body hits, touches, or makes any sort of bloody damned contact from with my face! Got that, you mother fucking jackass?" She threatened with eyes glaring in the smallest slits she could make while still having full vision._

_He just smirked at her paying no mind to threat. She didn't really expect him to pay any heed to her; she was a petite five foot six girl. But still, that didn't mean it didn't _infuriate_ her when she wasn't taken seriously. He took a couple steps closer to her as if daring her to hit him, which she was about to, don't worry. "So the little girl doesn't like my big rough hands touching her pretty little face?" He continued to dare her as he stepped even closer; she was able to feel his breath on her face. " How about my big rough lips touching her pretty little thighs?" He started laughing at what ever expression it was that she had just made. She guessed it was something along the lines of _disgusted

_"Okay, where the hell to do get off thinking you can sa—hey!" She was about draw her hand back which would lead into the most painful damned experience of that over confidents guy's life, but she had no time to as strong arms encircled around her from the back. Probably from one of the guys that Senior Faggot over here was fighting along side. She hadn't even sensed him coming? And she had let some asshole talk to her like that? She must have been really off her game that day._

_The man's arms were around her waist with her own arms crushed under them. She couldn't move them to ignite her abilities. She _hated _when something like this happened. That was her ultimate weakness, not having complete mobility of her hands. She was virtually powerless when she had something blocking her hands from touching to start the power flow through her body._

_Her eyes widened as she felt the man's lips roughly kissing her neck from behind her. "Damn it get off!" She struggled against the weight and muscle of his arms._

_"Hold on there Juno, save some for the rest of us big guy," Senior Faggot said as he and four other men that looked like they had been lifting weights since they were four years old started walking toward her with hungry looks in their eyes._

_"I said get off me you fucking tard!" She struggled and violently jolted her body this way and that to try and get him to loosen his grasp. But there seemed to be no such luck. _

_As one of Senior Faggot's men got a little too close for comfort, she took the opportunity to use the mans grasp as her weapon. She used his clutch as a back brace and brought both of her legs up. One swung left towards his shoulder and the other swung right at his knees. They formed a scissor cut and worked effectively to knock him down in one sweep._

_The men only laughed at the misfortune of the man that got too close, "Well it seems Little Lady's got some moves!" He looked at all his men and they all shared a hearty laugh at her expense. Okay. That really pissed her off. Wow. "That'll be of good use a little later won't it boys?" More laughing._

_She could have sworn her body was going to spontaneously combust from anger any second now. She was about to make another attempt at jolting her body free, but she noticed something out of the corner of her eye; she saw something coming toward them so fast that it could have been the wind itself. "Uhm, dude? Maybe we should move because that thing is coming right for us, you moron!"_

_He had no time to react, though, because whatever the hell it was that was coming toward them, made the connection. But not with both of them as Kagome had previously gotten ready for; when it got closer Kagome had a millisecond to register that it was indeed a man…a _fast _man that seemed to be trying to help her. _

_Whoever it was encircled an arm around the assailant and because of the momentum of his body, ripped the man right off of Kagome. But even though she was now free, don't think that she had escaped from that completely unscathed. In the man's efforts to stay in place rather than being hauled away from his prey, he latched his nails into her arms. Of course that wasn't enough to stop his body from flinging to the right with the immense force of the collision, but it was enough to get some big nail sized chunks out of her arms._

_She hardly seemed to notice, though; lack of thinking quickly was what got her into this mess in the first place, and she was not going to let that get in her way again. She looked up at Senior Faggot and Company who were looking her with deadpan expressions, trying rather hard to understand fully how they got from point A: making fun of their captive, to point B: starring at an utterly pissed off captive with the attacker fifty yards to the right._

_"Damn it Hune! I thought you said that fast Wolf kid was down!" He looked back with rage at the man that was presumable Hune._

_"I'm sorry sir! He was a second ago! I guess he was just faking it…" The man called Hune pleaded his defense in a rather unconvincing manner._

_"Excuse me, but if you are all done accusing each other, it really won't matter, because I'm going to kill you all right now anyway." Was she going to kill them? Maybe. Human lives didn't mean as much to her as they used to. Different lives didn't mean anything to humans, so why should human lives mean anything to Kagome? She wouldn't go on a killing spree because of this fact or anything, but you can bet she wouldn't hesitate to seriously mess up scum of the earth such as these people._

_"You know I was really having a fine day before this…" She slapped her hands together in front of her chest and a substance that rather resembled light pink electricity emitted from them, igniting her power. "I was going to go to my best friend's house…have a good time…" She then bent onto one knee and slapped one of her hands onto the ground. "I was gonna celebrate a happy go lucky anniversary with my two favorite people…" The elements that resided in the ground were immediately at the mercy of Kagome's mood and will. "But no… you just had to intercept me and my travels amidst my thoughts and catch me off guard…" Where the men stood in a clump, Kagome caused the ground to abruptly move up about ten feet, and then down again as quick as it had been in place before. All of the men went flying._

_"You just couldn't leave well enough fucking alone!" She ran to the first man that had been flung and roundhouse kicked him across the face before he had a chance to even regain his senses._

_She was about to run to take care of the rest of them be realized that Wolf or whatever they had called him was already well over pulling his wait in attacking the men._

_He was so fast that even her highly trained eyes could hardly follow him. He just swerved back and forth between them like a pinball machine… punching one guy here… kicking one guy there…_

_When he thought he was finished with everyone he took the chance to stop and smile at Kagome, who definitely would have smiled back at his gorgeous disposition had she not seen the man about to pounce on him from behind, "Look out!" She screamed as she slapped her hands together and then the ground once again. A section of the wall that was about twenty feet away from the two jetted out and collided with the man just as he was about to make contact with the overly attractive boy._

_The teenager presumably called Wolf watched the man fly and then noted the brick being sucked back up into the wall._

_"Nice."_

_"Thanks."_

_"I'm Koga Wolf."_

_"Kagome Higurashi. Hey."_

_"Hey."_

She was snapped out of her recollective thoughts at the sound of Sango pressing the buzzer again. "Do think he's not here?" Sango studied Kagome's profile while awaiting her answer. But wait… something was… "Hey Frenchy? Didn't you have a cut on your cheek from earlier whe—"

She stopped her question when Koga's voice came out of the speaker, "Yea?"

"Hey Koga it's me and Sango. Buzz us in?" Kagome asked as she mentally viewed his face in her mind. Seeing him would immediately brighten her day, she knew. It didn't matter how mean Inuyasha was to her, how much it hurt to heal herself, her troublesome health problems, or how much money she would have to spend making her kitchen clean… all that mattered was that she was about to see her boyfriend… but seriously, a drink or two wouldn't hurt, and possibly a little coke?

And now that she thought about it… she could always make Miroku clean her house for her…

"Hey I wasn't expecting you. This is an awesome surprise! I'll be down faster than you can blink." Kagome knew that he really could have been too, and when she was alone, he really would have. But Sango didn't know he was different, and he couldn't risk it any more than she herself could.

Still though, he was down in a flash.

"Hey, Beautiful," He said as he took her up into his arms and hugged her tight. "I missed you." He buried his face in her hair and breathed in her sweet aroma as if it was the first time he smelled it in a million years.

Sango coughed.

He smiled a bit and let go of his girlfriend. "Hey Sango," He laugh quietly as he brought Sango into a firm embrace as well. Sango and Koga sort of butted heads the first time they had met. He thought she acted too tough for her own good, and she thought he was the cockiest person she had ever met aside from Inuyasha. But after they got to really know each other, they had hit it off really well. Koga realized that Sango was actually the sweetest girl in the world when unprovoked, and after Sango noted how Koga treated Kagome, well, how could she not immediately love him?

After he let go of her he put his arm around Kagome's waist and Sango followed as they went up the stairs. "So, to what do I owe this wonderful surprise?" He looked down to the stunning girl beside him awaiting an answer.

Before Kagome could even open her mouth Sango spoke up, "Well actually, she's here to bum a few drinks off you—"

"_And _I wanted to see you… but the first one too," she hurriedly explained with a smirk played across her lips. She knew he wouldn't care that much.

He laughed just as expected, "Well I'm sorry to break it to you Baby, but Ginta and Hakakku are up there right now probably finishing off the last of whatever I've got." He noticed her face visibly darken as they walked into his apartment and saw that his statement was true. "Why do you need it anyway? I thought you were trying to stop, or at least cool it off a bit with the alcohol, you know it isn't good for you in the least."

By this time Sango was already sitting on the couch with Ginta while making Hakakku go get her a snack with looks of death, doom, and destruction promised in his near future if he didn't.

Koga brought Kagome into his room and sat her down on his bed. He was actually really worried about what she had been getting herself into. She was in bad situations left and right, and almost every time he saw her she had developed a new cut or bruise. He really didn't know if she loved him half as much as he loved her, but even if she didn't love him at all he really had no interest in sitting back and watching her destroy her life. He was trying to help her get her life on track; he knew her past and how strong she had become after something like that. But she had convinced herself that she couldn't do it without they the pick-me-up effects of drugs, namely the tweaking effects of coke, and alcohol. He wanted her life to be perfect, she deserved it. But she needed to make an effort, if not for herself, than for him.

He sat on the bed next to her, "And you promised me you'd stop the drugs completely. You have right?" Koga turned to face her.

She didn't answer him; just looked down at her hands, then back up at him. "You _have_, haven't you?" He gently took one of her hands out of her lap and took it up in his own. He kissed the top of it gently as he looked into her eyes, willing her to answer.

"No… not completely. But I _am_ trying, okay? You don't understand how hard it is to leave something like that behind." She met his gaze and tried really hard not to look down again. It was a sign of weakness, not something that she was willing to let anyone see, not even him.

He smiled and motioned her into his lap. She readily accepted the invitation as he put his arms around her waist. "You know that I'm not trying to annoy you or tell you how to live your life right?"

She put her arms around him as well and buried her face into neck. He could feel her nodding. "Sometimes… I just really don't think you understand how much you mean to me. You don't know what you do to me, Kagome, really."

She kissed his neck in response; she knew exactly what he was talking about. She didn't know if he really knew how much he meant to her either. He was someone that understood her, and accepted her for who she was, not to mention he was just about the most beautiful boy she'd ever seen, inside and out.

But was she truly in love with him? She didn't really know. She had been let down so many times in her life… it was unbelievably difficult for her to trust and/or lean on anyone completely, not even Sango or Miroku. And she didn't know if it was possible for her to be truly in love with him until she got passed her fears of him leaving her once she did.

She loved him with everything she had, that was for damn sure.

But _in love_?

"I know, Koga. I know. It's just really hard you know? There are just so many things that happen and times in my day where I just can't help but need—" She stopped herself. She was just turning this around into a stupid, big circle. "You know what… you're completely right. I don't need it. I have you. And that's definitely all I need. I'll try harder, really." She brought her lips up to meet his and she put her arms around his lower back. He pressed her body against his even more with the force of his embrace.

She remembered all too well the fight they had had about her… habits… when he had told her that he had wanted her to give up drugs in the first place. She was having a hard time succumbing to his request. Its not that he didn't understand how hard it was, because he had once been addicted to crystal meth, but still…

_"No Kagome! You don't need any of that shit! All you need is _me_. Me, Sango, and Miroku. We can help you with whatever is wrong in your life… _I_ can help you." He put his hands on her shoulders and whipped her almost aggressively around to make her face him dead on. _

_"Koga you don't need to act so fucking motherly. I can take care of my—"_

_"Why is it that you can't give me the one thing I'm asking of you, Kagome? All I want is for my girlfriend to lean on and trust me…not just with your abilities, but also with your feelings. The girl I love more than anything else in the world… to put the faith in me to help her with the simple troubles of the day! Is that so fucking much to ask?"_

_He didn't give her the look of anger that would be expected out of a conversation like this. It was sheer disappointment. She opened her mouth to answer, but he cut her off before she could say anything. _Again

_ "Tell me, _really_, is that so much to ask of you Kagome? I'm not asking you to have sex with me, I'm not asking you to wait on me and my friends hand and foot… all I'm asking is for you to use me as a crutch, instead of always relying on just your own damned two feet! You think every single person in the entire world isn't worthy of at least one fucking chance with your feelings… so you keep them inside or dump them on inanimate objects that don't have what it takes to betray you. Kagome… just because I'm _capable_ of leaving or betraying you doesn't mean I'm fucking going to!" He paused for a second to calm his nerves; he really didn't mean to yell at her._

_"It just means I'm _capable_." He starred at her straight in the eye, _daring_ her to look away._

_Kagome didn't blink the entire time. Her eyes stayed wide open, her breath remained trapped in her throat. She had no right to be sad or mad over what he was saying, she knew it was true._

_After she snapped out of her daze, she lowered her head, "I know, Koga, and I plead guilty." She looked up at him with a small smile, too bad one wasn't exactly returned. "I just need you to understand that I'm trying."_

_After no reaction from him, she turned around and made a slow move toward the door, thinking that he was infuriated with her. Why wouldn't he be? He was completely right… Crap, he must think she was a terrible person. He had given her so much… and she couldn't even stop doing drugs for him._

_She got about two steps away before she felt a hand that was firm, yet gentle at the same time, close around her wrist. Koga stood up and pulled her into his arms, his lips on hers, his arms around her lower back. It wasn't long or passionate, just enough to get his point across, "I'm not mad at you in the least, Gorgeous," he whispered into her ear when they pulled apart, "so don't you dare think that I am," He looked at her with a smile that immediately got wider once he saw the light back into her face. It made him insane to see her sad, and it drove him crazy to know that it was his fault. "I just wish my girlfriend loved me half as much as I love her."_

"You're amazing, my Kagome…" he breathed into her ear. She wrapped her legs around his waist and he supported the rest of her weight with his hold. He laid her down onto his bed and began to kiss her more.

She trusted him completely in a situation like this. She knew he would never go any farther than she was willing to go, and with that thought in mind, she brought his body closer to her with her embrace. She was determined to kiss him until she had no more breath.

Which was actually coming up here pretty quick…

Koga decided it was his turn to have a little fun with his girl. He brought his lips down to her neck, and then her collarbone, as well as his hands out of her tangled hair to move them down to her waist, then a little bit lower.

Okay… now to go in for the kill… He pretty much just decided to tickle her until she had no more voice to scream.

"Ahhhh!!! Koga STOOOP!!!" She yelled between her laughter. She pushed and shoved at his hands frantically.

"You think that's gonna work? Your gonna have to _beg_ me LITTLE GIRL!" He laughed manically while having the time of his young nineteen-year-old life. He lived for moments like this. Teasing her for the fact that she was only seventeen and not yet a legal adult was his idea of great fun. But she was definitely stronger than he had anticipated. She was _always_ stronger than he anticipated. She put her hands on his chest amidst her crying and laughing and kind of _launched_ him off her, she could here a big thud hit the floor. "Oops…"

"OW! Kagome!"

"Sorry!" She attempted to jump over him but she ended up toppling to the floor with his hand around her ankle. She pounced on top of him and started to tickle him as well. He wasn't actually that ticklish, but he pretended to be if not just so they could continue having fun.

They laughed and kissed and rolled on the floor amidst there game until their stomachs hurt so much from the laughing they just couldn't take it any more. "Now come here my beautiful girlfriend of mine," he laughed as he pulled her back onto his bed. They laughed and kissed and laughed a little more. This was how it was supposed to be. He would tickle her, she would smile. Then they would kiss a little more. She would pounce on him, he would smile. Then they would kiss a lot more.

This was her boyfriend, and she adored him more than anyone. Still though, she couldn't push away the thought of how good just _one_ shot of Bacardi 151 Rum would feel sliding down her throat at that moment.

She made a mental note to go to the store after she left Koga's. She wasn't _exactly_ breaking her promise to him. He just told her to tone it down it down a bit with the alcohol. So… she'd just buy one bottle instead of two.

No harm done right?

**Awww he loves her so much! So cute :0) too bad she doesn't love him like a fourth as much. Poor baby. How depressing. **

**Okay so I lied. **

**I said there'd be Inuyasha in this chapter… **

**Okay I kinda lied… sorta. NEXT CHAPTER THOUGH! Okay? I swear! **

**Pleaaassseee review mmkay you guys? it makes me really happy :0) **

**HOPEFUL OVER ALL REVIEWS: 30? **

**Thanks soooo much for reading this chapter and putting up with my LIES hahaha. **


	5. Fair

**Hey guys so sorry it took so long. But you know I love you guys right? Well here you go! I hope you enjoy!**

* * *

"Bye Koga!" Kagome yelled from the bottom floor of his apartment. She could see his long black ponytail spilling around the sides of his neck as he waved to her from the window of the top story of the building.

"Bye Baby! Don't get yourself into trouble, you hear? You promised!" He yelled to her retreating figure.

She pretended she didn't hear him as she continued walking down the street, hands in the pockets of her leather jacket. It was cold this season, and she was overdue for a new jacket, she thought. The one she had now was getting a little worn down for her taste.

"So what now?" Came Sango's low-pitched question, "We goin' home? And by that I mean your place, I'm crashin' there tonight, just thought I'd let you know," she continued with a passive half smile. It's not that she didn't have a perfectly good apartment the exact same as Kagome's a couple doors down, she just wasn't the most fond of being alone.

She watched her breath disappear into the night as she briefly thought of what her life would have been like if she had never met Kagome. Not exactly amazing, she figured. They were both street rats when they met. They lived by steeling, trusted no one, and pretended what they were doing wasn't wrong.

Kagome was the absolute best, Sango mused. She couldda sworn her best friend could have a stolen a mattress from a federal prison upon feeling like it. She always sort of looked up to her and her actions, and really just the way she presented herself in general. It seemed to Sango that Kagome had an air about her that just screamed of confidence, as if she could get herself out of any situation no matter what the cost or consequence. Kagome did anything she wanted, when she wanted, and never had to think twice about it; she was _always_ confident.

That was something Sango really lacked when they first met. She had never exactly had a mother, but it wasn't that big of deal for her. She never had it, therefore she didn't miss it. She had lived with her father and brother. But when her father left, and brother died…

There was just nothing left of her.

Kagome had helped her fix herself, emotionally speaking. She had always known how to fight, and was very strong, but really… what are skills when not paired with a suitable person with which to possess them?

"Sure, let's just stop at the little corner market before we head back, alright?" Kagome breathed out a mist of hot air, easily visible within the night sky. She watched it escape from her lips, a little disappointed when there was nothing left of it. She caught the gaze of a street light a little farther down the street, her only source of light, it seemed, on this dark street corner.

"What for?" Came Sango's weary reply. Even though she had a sneaking suspicion of what before her friend even opened her mouth to speak.

"I just want something to drink is all, gotta problem with that?" She lightly punched the girl beside her in the arm as a slight smile spread across her lips. Its not like she was gonna go get drunk off her ass in some sort of public place and make a totally ass out of herself… just at home.

She liked getting totally shit-faced with Sango. It was hilarious.

"No, but didn't you just tell Koga you would lay off the drinking, Frenchy?" She stopped walking and grabbed the girl's wrist as it made a light connection with her shoulder. She made eye contact, hoping to see some kind of remorseful reaction to her words, which were aimed directly at her conscience.

Nothing.

"Aww come on, Sanny! Live a little would ya?" She laughed aloud and attempted to grab her wrist back, but Sango only gripped it tighter, not letting her piercing eyes to falter even a bit. She didn't think it was one bit fair for Kagome to say she was going to do something for Koga to prove how much she cared about his feelings, and then just…

Not _do_ it.

The smirk on Kagome's face immediately vanished as she pulled her arm back hard, forcing Sango to loosen her grip unless she was fine inflicting actual pain, which in this case, she wasn't looking to do. "Come on, Sanny," she whined as she rubbed her wrist, "seriously, you only give me that look when you think I'm either going to do something terrible, or I'm standing in front of the TV. And since there's no TV around, what, dare I ask, great sin is it that you think I am going to commit upon having a shot or two?"

Apparently, the girl standing bewildered in front of her wasn't getting where she was trying to go with this. Sango let out a breath in the form of an elongated sigh, irately shoved her hands in her pockets, and continued walking without another glance at her best friend, as if to dismiss the conversation.

Kagome didn't say anything more about it, but couldn't help but sneak little peaks in the girl's direction every once in awhile, if only to learn what she might have been thinking about. Honestly, she couldn't stand it. As they continued walking, the silence between them had grown so great that Kagome felt as though she was going to spontaneously combust.

She was about to open her mouth to ask Sango what the hell her problem was until she heard her friend utter, "I don't think it's fair." She stopped to stare at Kagome's still retreating back as a foundation of making her voice louder, "It's not fair how you say you are going to do something for him, and then you just _change_ your mind the fucking second you leave." Her adrenaline and anger rose with each word she said. She knew Kagome wouldn't just leave a comment like the one she had just yelled unspoken for. She was treading on thin-ice with this one, but it had to be said, in her opinion. Did Kagome just not _see_ how much he gave to her and how little effort she made to give anything back?

Kagome's eyebrows rose, "_What_? You think that I'm doing this just so that I can spite him? Just so I can _prove_ he doesn't have any control over me?" She crossed her arms and stomped back over to Sango to stare at her in the eye, as if daring her to answer that.

"Well, actually, I wasn't even thinking that. Do you think that maybe you just answered your own question?" One step closer.

They were head to head. One of them completely pissed, and the other one slightly annoyed at the accusation. And that particulate girl wasn't willing to get in a fight over something, in her opinion, as stupid as this. Who did Sango think she was? Telling her what _she_ thought… telling her what _her_ own motives were. Whatever.

"Whatever." Hands back in the pockets, and a heel to a toe later, she was walking back in the direction of the liquor store. If they continued to stop like that, she was never going to get there. She was convinced. And right now, she could use that clear bottle of liquid more than anything.

Sango watched her best friend's retreating back. "Fine, whatever." She mumbled as she turned on her heels in the other direction. Maybe she wouldn't be staying at Frenchy's tonight.

Kagome didn't hear footsteps following her, and allowed the ego-wrenching blow it took to turn her head and watch Sango retreat in the other direction. She had to admit, she hadn't expected the girl to just leave the fight alone as she did. She hadn't expected her to just _leave_ her there on a secluded, black street corner either. It kinda hurt.

But, as previously said, whatever. She had a destination to get to.

The rest of the walk was ostensibly harmless to her psyche or physical well being in any way. Which, considering the time of night and the fact that she was a petite, seemingly beautiful, seventeen year old girl, walking by herself, with no visible strings attached, that was pretty lucky.

She pushed open the doors not even bothering to look up, let alone uttering her usual 'hello' to the clerk that owned the store, she was a little too pissed for casual polite conversation at the moment. The place was open 24/7 and she couldn't remember ever seeing someone else at that counter other than him. She wasn't even sure when the kind old man even slept; even _that_ pissed her off at the moment. But then again, she had never been in there this late. The old man had to sleep sometime, right?

She stomped to the back of the store, grabbed her liquor of choice, plodded back up to the cashier, and set the bottle of sweet salvation on the counter with a thud. Still starring at the floor, as she felt so low she was sure she could have sunk down there without anyone noticing anyway, she ripped the money out of her pocket and shoved it toward whoever the hell it was at cashier. She bent down and buried her face in her arms, which were folded across the counter as she waited for her crap to be rung up.

She waited for the beeping sound that meant her item was being checked for the price, but none came. "What the hell are you waiting for?" She mumbled into her arms.

"I'm sorry, Bitch, I'm afraid I can't sell this to you." She could _hear _the cockiness in his voice… the second he said "I'm" she knew who it was that was standing in front of her. She brought her head up immediately to face the smirking face of Inuyasha, as he tapped his clawed hand on the counter, eyes glistening with amusement all the while.

Great.

_Juuuuust fucking great. _

"And why the hell not?" Kagome barely bit out through clenched teeth. She folded her arms across her chest, more to keep herself from ripping his head from his neck than anything, and glared right into his oddly colored eyes.

"Because you're a minor," an increased grin, "you and I both know have to be eighteen to purchase alcohol." She could just see the laughter burning in his eyes. Fine, he was eighteen, Sango was eighteen, Miroku was eighteen, Koga was _nineteen_… and she was… what?

Seventeen.

Awesome.

"Don't be an asshole, Asshole, you know as well as I do that I'm eighteen in a month." She hoped to her God in heaven that he would just give her break. Why did everything have to happen to her tonight? The guilt trip from Koga, the accusations from Sango… and now the _anything_ from this bastard?

_Whhhhyyy? _

"Great! Then why don't you come back in a month. Would you like for me to keep this on hold for—"

"Damn it, Inuyasha!" She slammed her palms onto the counter, "Fine! If you won't sell this to me…" she paused as if contemplating to even say what was on her mind, "then I'll just take it." With that she grabbed the end of the bottle from his hands and proceeded to walk out the door. Her face was hot from how much anger was seeping out of her pours. Her boyfriend gave her crap, her best friend gave her crap, and now, yippidy fucking doo da, her enemy was giving her crap!

What fucking next?

Inuyasha jumped over the counter and grabbed her wrist before she could even get one foot out onto the curb, that's what. "I don't think so, Babe, unless you want that pretty red-lipsticked face of yours to meet the pretty red-tiled floor," he said as he squeezed her wrist so hard, he earned a pained squeal from her, and a quickly released bottle from her pale hand.

She yanked her wrist away and temporarily wondered what the hell obsession everyone had with grabbing her wrists lately, but it wasn't really something on her top twenty favorite things to have done to her.

"You know, Inuyasha, that's the second time you've mentioned my pretty red lips," She smiled as she took a step closer. She was _going_ to get that bottle, damn it!

"Why is that?" A half smile.

One more step closer. "Is it… because you notice them?"

"Whatever the hell you're trying to do, Kagome, just stop it will ya? You're making an ass outta yourself." He rolled his eyes as he brought the bottle back around to the other side of the counter.

"Do you… want them?" She walked up to the counter and pursed her lips out. She noticed he was trying to conceal his reaction to her stimuli. Ahh the predictability of boys.

He forced himself to look away. Even though he damn near hated everything about that girl, he had to admit, she was beautiful. And beauty, he could not deny, was by far his worst weakness. "Come on, just leave will you? I have work to do, seriously."

"Do you want them _on _you?" Holy crap she was just about to bust up laughing. But she had to admit… he was very _very_ attractive. She couldn't help but wonder what her lips on his skin would feel like… don't think for a second she didn't hate every bone in that boys body, but man, not even a blind chick could deny he was gorgeous.

By this time he was standing behind the counter, leaning his palms on the surface, starring at her with a bemused expression. He knew what she was trying to do, get him flustered and then take the stupid bottle. Hell, if she wanted it that badly he'd just give it to her. He didn't give a damn that she was only seventeen; he just enjoyed pissing her off more than anything. But what he would not do was let her walk out without paying for it.

"On your lips? Your neck?" He rolled his eyes again as she, too, leaned over the counter with her palms supporting her weight.

He really couldn't take her prodding anymore, and he had schoolwork to do. He slept in class, and did class work during his job at night when he was _supposed _to be sleeping. Isn't that what everybody did? "Look, if you'll just fuckin' leave you can buy the damn—"

"Your… cute little fuzzy ears? I bet you'd like that, huh?" She reached her hand out to touch the ears on his head that were supposed to be concealed by the rosary he wore on his neck. But he slapped her arm away with a numb hand.

Actually, his entire body was numb at the moment, his legs, his arms, his _brain_. Everything. He just kind of stood there, starring at her, as she just smirked back.

She rolled her eyes back at him as he had to done so her so many times before and was thoroughly amused at his reaction. "Well then, if you're just going to stand there like a moron…" She made a move to grab the bottle once again until she felt his clawed hand around her wrist… again.

More hands around her wrists… this just wasn't her fucking day was it?

But this time, it was _hard_. Hard enough to almost break it. It was all very fast. The way he grabbed her wrist without breaking the contact with her eyes. The way he used his immense strength to use nothing but his hold on her arm as a tool to bring himself over the counter. The way she was against the wall in a second flat with his body up against hers so she could hardly move at all. The way his hand was around her throat, and his mouth was at the nape of her neck.

She hardly hard time to blink. But it was real.

"How… the _hell_ can you see through the beads, Kagome?" His grip on her neck wasn't hard, in fact she could breath normal, she figured it was there just to prove that he wanted answers, and he was _going _to get them.

But something _was_ causing her breathing to stifle… the hot air from his mouth that she could feel flowing around her neck, down to her back. It's not as though she felt threatened, but she definitely didn't feel comfortable. She had a boyfriend, and what he was doing was making her feel dirty… like she was cheating on the boy that loved her so much. She knew it wasn't right for her to feel that way, because _he _was the one who was pushing himself against _her. _But maybe… she felt like that because she _wasn't_ pushing him away… because she _wasn't _screaming at him to get off… because she didn't _hate_ the feeling of his body against hers… so close, that she could feel the heat of his misguided, confused rage.

She should hate it.

Everything about it.

She hit her head on the wall, _hard_, as he pushed himself into her, and the wall just _happened_ to be there to break her fall, but it didn't faze her as much just then as it probably would later. "Wouldn't you like to know?" She whispered into his ear. She could hardly breath now… the proximity… he was too close to her… he needed to move.

Damn it.

She was over thinking this.

He tightened his grip around her neck, not enough to snap it, but enough to make her choke. He kept it tight for a couple seconds before loosening it once again, allowing air to flow through to her lungs once again. She gasped for breath and coughed a little before opening her mouth to speak, "Inuyasha, I'm not telling you anything until you get the fuck off me."

He made no indication that he was going to move. "That means _now_, Inuyasha! Do you want me to talk or not?" Still, no indication. He just stood there… breathing into her neck. What was he thinking?

"You know… don't you?" She heard him mumble into her neck. The hand that was around her neck slackened, and fell down to his side. He slowly backed away from her, glaring into her eyes. Everything about her right then… _repulsed_ him. She knew this whole fucking time… she knew they were the same this _whole time_… and yet she did nothing. Just stood there laughing at his attempts to hide what he was with beads and smarts, while she just had to _exist._ She was different too… yet she looked completely human. All she had to do… was just exist.

How fair was that?

He looked human too… except for his ears, fangs, and claws. It's not like he had a _tail_ or anything.

But still.

He barely noticed her grab the bottle of Bacardi and walk out the door. It was the little bell that meant the door had opened which snapped him out of his thoughts anyway. He walked back to the counter, a little numb, a little pissed, and a little weary from how things turned out, then he noticed the money she had left on the counter.

The exact amount for the liquor, maybe a little more.

Damn that bitch.

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**Well there you go. A little Inuyasha in this chapter as I had previously promised :0)**

**Hope your happy with this. And I have a question? Do we like their fighting as of right now? Cuz do they hate each other at the moment. Why? You'll find out later. But I mean… they fight enough to not care if they HURT each other… they just haven't attempted to kill each other or anything like that… so is the amount of fighting they are doing good for you guys? and how do you like everyone else's relationships as of yet? Sango and Kagome… Koga and Kagome… anything that needs to be changed or whatever? How about my style of writing? Enough detail? To much? Haha sorry about this… I just like to know what you guys think! **

**HOPEFUL OVERALL REVIEWS: 50? **

**That'd make me insanely happy you guys… thanks for thinking of me! **


	6. Sucks

**Soooooooooooo long to get this out! So im sorry to say that I wrote this a long time ago and just forgot to post it… but I did. AH! Don't shoot me please… ive been SO busy you don't even understand my pain! A dance show, jazz competeions left and right, vocal performances all over the place, festivals, a play, ANOTHER dance show that I had to freaking choreograph, a sprained ankle RIGHT before it, strep throat missing me 4 days of school that ive been trying to catch up with forever and now finals this week… but finals are over TOMORROW! And I promise you that updates will becoming soooo often now! I have so much of it planned ) youll be happy with me. I swear to you that you will!**

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Kagome walked down the halls of her school the next day with Sango at her side, as she was every so often instructed to go to her high school classes instead of taking the AP ones online at Kagome's apartment. They casually walked to Kagome's locker and, after carefully putting the combination, took out her AP Chemistry book and notebook that she would need for her upcoming class.

After a quick glance to the side at the open locker door's mirror to check her red lipstick and a quick mumble of "let's go" to Sango, they continued down the hall without speaking or looking anywhere but ahead. It's not that they were necessarily mad at each other or anything, they had still walked to school together that morning and kind of talked… but they weren't exactly on good terms as of yet after the little falling out they had the previous night on the streets.

Speaking of last night… Inuyasha. Oh damn. She really told him didn't she? Oh yea. She did. She actually couldn't wait to see him today. He had looked so flustered the last time they met at the liquor store… yet again, now he had probably gotten over the shock. Yes, Inuyasha was a difference, and Kagome knew it.

And now, so did he.

This would certainly make her day interesting, she mused. A small smile graced the corners of her mouth as she wondered what chemistry would be like. It was most definitely her favorite class, with it being her favorite subject and her by far favorite teacher. And also… Inuyasha was in that class. Usually, that was the only reason she had to detest that period, but today, she had to admit she was rather looking forward to it.

Believe it or not, Kagome was almost at genius level when it came to molecular sciences. All of her abilities based themselves upon the knowledge of molecular structure and chemical bonds, what better incentive was there to pay attention in chemistry class? She wasn't the brain that answered every single question in class with really complicated explanations so that no one could understand her but the teacher, but she definitely could have if she was happened to be pissed at the world that day and wanted to make them all feel dumb.

How fun that would be.

With her power, she had to have an absolute knowledge of what was doing before she could even hope to ignite her abilities. It wasn't like those cartoons shows the younger children watched about how the people would shoot lightening from there hands and such just by saying a magic word or simply _feeling_ like it. She had to know exactly what she was doing.

There are two kinds of changes in the world of chemistry: physical, and chemical. Physical was no problem for her; honestly, all she had to do was understand what elements or polyatomic ions she was working with in the first place and merely slide them passed each other. Simple. That was how she made the earth move. That was completely a no brainer. But let's say… she felt like making water when her only material was the air around her. The name of oxygen is H2O, or hydrogen oxide speaking in terms of nomenclature. Hydrogen and oxygen are both located in the atmosphere around her, all she would have to do is take those and put them together right?

And poof?

Water?

No. Not quite. She needed to study the elements. She needed to know the charges on both, and then balance them out accordingly, she would need to understand the amount of electrons on each, and place them correctly throughout the bond in order to make the molecule stable. Would the bond turn out ionic? Polar? Polar covalent? She needed to be sure, in order to correctly put them together. The way to stick two elements that will turn out ionic and elements that will turn out covalent are completely different. The electronegativity. Which one had more protons? Which element wanted the electrons more and therefore would pull the electrons closer with more electronegativity? How many moles of grams would it really take of oxygen to balance out the mass of hydrogen? But then again… that's getting into Stoichiometry.

You see, she needed to _know_ all of that and so much more before expanding her power into the wonderful world of molecular compounds, formulas, and bonding. It was safe to say she'd been studying her entire life, and as far as she was concerned, wasn't every chemistry class just getting her that much closer to becoming stronger?

Think about it… was there really anything she couldn't do after learning everything she needed to know? There are so many elements in just the earth we stand on… she could create so many things combining those elements together. Toluene and nitrogen? Both in common ground. What do they create? TNT. Oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen? All in the air. What do they create? A reaction of _combustion_.

She could fucking _blow something up_ with her bare freaking hands once she got this whole thing down!

They very thought excited her.

Oh yes.

But for now, it was chemistry class. Sango also had this class with her and Inuyasha, and the second they walked in she went to take her seat in the middle lab table on the left side, right behind the one Inuyasha was supposed to be at. There was no one in the room yet, other than the two girls. Wasn't that like against school rules or something? Allowing students to be in a classroom without any teacher supervision? Not that it mattered… because Riley had given her a skeleton key that opened every door in the building anyway…

She was absent mindedly leaned on the front teacher desk starring at the ceiling while being lost in her thoughts while Sango was sitting at her seat getting out her book and notepaper. It was weirdly quiet. It was never that quiet between the two best friends. _"She must still be pissed…" _Kagome thought with a sigh that could be heard over the uncomfortable silence that surrounded them.

She was about to saying something to the girl seemingly buried in a notebook before the door opened with a start. She looked over at the door and chuckled to herself at the sight before her. "Damn it…" She heard Riley whisper to himself as he tried to prop the door open with his foot, holding his bag and laptop in one hand and his coffee in the other. It was very comical, and was rather tempted to just leave him there and watch his amusing struggle.

"You need some help, Ri?" Kagome finally asked, smiling from ear to ear, genuinely happy to see the guy as she walked over and opened the door for him. He stepped inside, and put his crap down at his desk. When looking down at his laptop that he was attempting to set up, he noticed a spot of coffee on his shirt. "Shit…" A curse again on account of his beverage.

"You know, Mr. Buller, you could get fired if you keep swearing like that," came Sango's somnolent voice from the middle of the classroom. She didn't look up, appearing tired, but he could feel the smirk in her voice. He had to admit, her efforts made him chuckle.

"Hey shut up, Sango, remember I can fail you if I want to—"

"But we both no he never would. Right Ri?" Kagome turned around to face him with a smile that reached her eyes. She really loved seeing him. He was a chemical genius just as she was and was a teacher right out of college. He had only just turned 22 and came to teach at her high school with a master's degree in chemical engineering that he apparently had gotten _very_ fast.

Didn't you need to be in school for like… 8 years to get a masters in _anything_? Whatever. Why he came to teach at her _high school_ when he could be leading a biological warfare project for the government at the moment making him a million dollars a second was beyond her. But it didn't matter; he was here teaching her what she needed to know. He was gorgeous. And awesome. And always got her into clubs even though she was underage. Not even Koga could do that. Oh yes, life was good.

And better still, Koga and Riley had met, they enjoyed each other's company and hit it off real well. Of course Koga was a little weirded out about the fact that he was her _teacher_… in fact that prospect in general was a little hard to cope with, she had to admit. But still, really, why did it have to matter? So he was the one who taught her what she needed to know. Why was there a law that said they couldn't be really close friends at the same time?

They'd met when she was a freshman and he was a senior at that very same school. She had always been young for her grade and was only 14 at the time he had been 18. Safe to say, he was her first love. Well maybe second… but it's not exactly fun to think of the actual first… She and Riley had only been friend's back then but she was devastated when it came time for him to graduate and go to college; she never thought she would see him again. But low and behold, four years and a senior year later, here he was… _teaching_ her. Weird? Oh yea. They could never really get that teacher-student relationship thing down after being so close before.

Riley smiled at Kagome and opened his arms for her to hug him. _"I've known her for so long…she's grown up a lot,"_ he thought as he hugged the petite girl tight. When they met as younger teens it was apparent to him that Kagome was a broken girl. Very broken. And she liked him. A lot. It was almost too easy to see when she smiled at him with those big, dark eyes when they were younger, but she was just a baby to him back then. More like a little sister. Any other guy would have probably been happy to exploit that kind of torn and exposed girl… but she was lucky to have found him, the one who wouldn't no matter how much she wanted him to. He had to admit that she was even beautiful as a fragile, little fourteen-year-old girl. And sure, he had been attracted to her a couple times back then… but he could never have let anything happen. But now was different. She was older. And the age difference didn't matter so much. Even though he was now her teacher, and technically if he told any of his friends "hey I totally dig this student of mine" they would probably hit him and call him a pedophile… but really… but he totally dug this student of his.

It sucked for him because A) she was his _student_ B) she wasn't 18 yet and… well… anything they did would be statutory and highly illegal by law C) she had a boyfriend that was a really nice guy and D) he always 'play' asked her out and she always 'play' said no… even though both answers were kind of serious.

Blah.

Life sucked.

And so… even though he was an extremely attractive twenty two year old male with chicks probably lining up for him, he couldn't do anything about it because this one girl that he couldn't have was always on his mind… and they would just stay friends, as clearly stated by Kagome.

Oh yea.

Life still sucks.

"Hey Kags," he said into her ear with his arms still around her.

"Hm?" She mumbled into the nape of his neck. This boy could have easily been her best friend aside from Sango. She really loved him to pieces. She loved her teacher to pieces… okay no matter how many different ways you looked at that it was still creepy. He's only 22 you guys! _Shut up!_

"I _looooveeee yoooouuuuu_!" He said in a high-pitched sing song voice in her ear while lightly tickling the sides of her waist.

She quickly pushed his hands away with one penetrating squeal that caused Sango to look up even though he just brought them back up to be around he waist. She didn't even know Kagome _could_ squeal that high. Weird. "I _know_ you do you big loser!" She shoved her forehead onto his and bent forward as she said this to cause him to bend back.

"Hahaha well as long as we're clear," he managed to get out with a laugh as he removed his hands from her back. He brought one hand to the side of her face to guide it toward him so he could press her cheek to his lips in one fluid motion as a friendly show of how much he really cared for her.

Just as he did so the bell that meant the students had five minutes to get to class rang and the door opened to reveal none other than a sleepy Inuyasha was with his eyes half open and his books almost falling out of his grasp. He was about to walk to his lab table on the other side of the room when he stopped mid yawn to take note of his teacher. His eyes went a fraction wider then normal as he noticed the rather odd skeptical of his lips on a Kagome's face and her arms around him.

Ok. Weird. That would be our _teacher_. But whatever floats her boat, I guess…

He resumed his yawn and stretched his free arm as though he had seen nothing at all, though he really couldn't resist at last _one_ comment at her expense. "Well then, Kagome," he smirked from the doorway, "You whore yourself around so much that even the teacher gets a piece? Well… I guess kudos to you then."

Riley released the seething girl from his arms and attempted a reprimand… not that he was really good at it seeing as how this was his first year as a teacher… and the fact Kagome _definitely_ told him to shut up the second he did. That, he had to admit, was a little humorous. "Hey, Inuyasha that's not—" he started.

"_Shut up, Riley!"_ Kagome fumed through clenched teeth. Riley's eyebrows went up and he smiled a tad as he raised his hands a bit to show it was all hers. He even slowly backed away as to show he didn't mean to interfere. He knew how much she detested this guy. She had cried to him about this particular boy when she was younger, and she even still bitched about him to this day.

"Where the _hell_ do you get off saying something like that to me, Dog Boy?" She walked up to him and clenched her fists.

"Just callin' 'em like I sees 'em. Come on, Kagome, you can't look at me and disagree with me if I say that looks a little weird." He just grinned at her with a level voice. She now felt dumb for shouting. Shit.

"Well… it's none of your business anyway." She, too, crossed her arms and waited for his reply. What? No violence? This whole day was filled with weird. And first period hadn't even started yet. Awesome. She was also a tad upset that he didn't reply to her Dog Boy comment. After all of that… did he really not even care that she was a difference like him?

"She's right you know," came Riley's comically random comment from his chair where he was typing on his computer.

"Shut it, Riley! Or I'm gonna hit you!" She didn't bother to turn around, because that would break the eye contact blinking war thing that she seemed to have started with Inuyasha. She was just kind of yelling in his face without regard to the fact that she wasn't even talking to him. Oh well.

"Hey, you can't do that. I'm the teach— OW! Damn it, Kagome!" He rubbed his chin from where Kagome had kicked it from behind. She didn't really mean to kick him that hard… but she wasn't really willing to break eye contact with Inuyasha either… so she wasn't _exactly_ paying attention to how much force she put into the flailing her leg back hoping to make contact with a certain nuisance behind her.

Inuyasha released his arms, and shrugged. "You know, Teach… if I were you I wouldn't let this bitch push you around like that." He said calmly as he pushed passed Kagome to go to his seat. People were now starting to come in seeing how there was about 30 seconds left until the tardy bell rang. As the people filed in she just continued starring at the door with an irritated disposition, arms still crossed, and mouth slightly agape. What just happened? Was there seriously no insulting banter? No exciting violence?

Okay.

Weird.

More weird.

She went to her lab table and sat next to Sango who was still nose deep in her notebook. She took a sneak peak to see what was there that was oh so important. Nothing. They were blank pages. Wow.

She smirked to herself knowing that Sango was watching that whole weird scene unfold instead of pretending to be highly concentrated. So she couldn't have been all _that_ mad at her still, right? She had never gotten a chance to talk to Sango before class, but maybe now—

"You know if you keep acting like that around Riley he's going to fall more in love with you than he already is." Sango whispered to her while still starring at the empty pages of the book in front of her.

To say Kagome was taken aback by this statement was a major understatement. "Come on, Sango, you know—"

"And somehow the administration will find out and he'll get fired. Do you really want that?" Sango now turned to face her best friend. Face completely serious. _"You have no problem hurting your boyfriend and you have no problem hurting your best guy friend… so what is it that you are doing that's hurting me that I don't yet know about, Kagome?"_ Sango thought to herself with hard eyes starring at the girl next to her.

"Sango, Riley isn't in love with me. All those things he says are jokes from our child hood when I had a crush on him the size of freaking sin. Nothing more." She tried to match the hardness in Sango's eyes with her own but it was becoming increasingly difficult to cover up what she was feeling with any simple mask. Sango just sighed and turned her attention back to her wordless notebook. What was so damn interesting about wordless blue lined paper?

Kagome wanted to kill it.

Screw the stupid paper.

Her best friend should be talking to her right now instead of using a damn white rectangle as an excuse to avoid her gaze.

Damn it all. Today sucks. And the first period bell hasn't even rung yet. Fucking _amazing_

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**Not much in this chapter, I'm very sorry sorry to say. But ill be posting more really soon. Just wanted to give you some insight into Kag's abilities a little. So you understand her powers aren't fully developed and such. AND you really need to love Riley with all of your heart k? haha. More soon ) **

**60 reviews please! And the next chapter shall be yours before you know it! Thanks youuu **

**--lina **


	7. Dare

The rest of Kagome's day was… how do you say? Boring. Full of nothing but school crap. Riley had classes so he couldn't entertain her, and Sango was irritated by her so really, she was no fun at all. She resorted to hanging out with her other friends. Her closest of them being Ayumi, Eri, and Yuka. She was fine being in their presence at school, as they were cool girls, but a lot to handle in large doses.

What was really bothering her though was something she just couldn't shake. She wanted to know why Inuyasha had been so weird in chemistry. Really, it hadn't been all _that_ uncommon she supposed. But there was no physical violence! That could count as strange. And also there was no mention of the previous night between the two of them. He hadn't just up and forgot had he?

No possible way. He just didn't want to talk about it… or something. But that really took a toll on her nerves, because she _did_ want to talk about it. More than anything actually. The thought of another person other than her being different intrigued Kagome. When she had met Koga she had studied him up and down, curiosity peeked by which means he went through to control his ability and what were the causing of any sort of relapse that would hinder him on account of them. So on and so forth. Any sort of mechanics she could study that could somehow bring her closer to gaining knowledge of how she could deepen her own control of her abilities.

She was willing to put aside any kind of hate she had for Inuyasha for a few minutes if he would just tell her what his abilities were all about. Of course he wouldn't be as willing to share the deepest depths of his most cared for secret with her. Damn these stupid human relationships.

As she was walking with her three friends to the place they would normally sit to eat lunch, she noticed Sango and Hiten already there, chatting merrily away while eating whatever the hell it was that they were serving today. She sat down, making sure she was facing Hiten directly, and not Sango.

As she chatted along with the boy, her mind settled on the prospect of how Hiten was really attractive. He was also rather adorable as he sat there laughing heartily away at Sango about God knows what. She really respected that boy, and was very happy that he had become so close with her these passed couple of years. She drifted out of her thoughts as she noted someone coming toward them. She looked up, only to see soaked white hair, and a stunningly perfect physique.

Inuyasha had his shirt off. And he was sopping wet… okay. _Why_?

"Hey dude," Inuyasha said as he did this weird handshake 'pound it' thing with Hiten. She assumed that was a boy thing that girls weren't supposed to learn how to do efficiently.

She looked at Hiten with wide eyes, wondering why the hell _her_ friend dare talk to the bastard in front of them. What was even more irritating, Inuyasha wasn't even noticing her presence. Did she not exist to him anymore or something?

"Sup man?" Hiten replied casually while taking another bite of his sandwich.

"Weren't you gonna come swimming with us today? You said you didn't have anything to do during lunch."

_Didn't have anything to do?_ Okay, I'm sorry, but that was not okay with Kagome. What was she? Chopped fucking liver? She was just in a conversation with Hiten, if he _dare_ blow her off for this—

"Yea bro, I'll be there in a minute. Just lemme finish my sandwich," he attempted to say through the bite of food making its way down his throat.

Kagome looked dangerously, slowly, menacingly up at Inuyasha. Who, though he wasn't looking at her, had this… _smirk_ on his face. Whether or not it was directed toward her was debatable, though she would have given her life on a bet that it was. Really, he didn't do anything wrong, just asking for his friend to go swimming, she supposed, it was just that… she _knew_ that he was doing it just to get under her skin. Just so he could prove to her that her friends weren't as loyal to her petty antics of distaste toward him as she would have liked them to be.

Fine. Let him go.

She stood up angrily from the table, becoming eyelevel with Inuyasha from the other side as she did so. They made eye contact, and she communicated her hate for him with her glare. "Jeeze, what's wrong with you? Something especially large stuck in your ass today? That glare you're giving me could kill Satan."

"Yes, well, your presence really does bring out the worst in me. So if you don't like it, why don't you _leave_ and make everyone's life a little bit happier?" The edge in her voice was rather apparent. Her glower deepened as she leaned in closer to him. Becoming all the more ominous by the second. Honestly, he had no desire whatsoever to deal with the fury his existence brought out in her.

But more than that, he wanted to win.

He knew what she thought. She assumed that since he now knew she figured out that he was different, he would treat her differently, suck up to her or something. But no. That was never ever in a million fucking years going to happen. She thought she had the advantage? He would show her what an advantage was all about.

She starred at him, fury rising, as she watched him contemplate his next move. He knew it would be the most prudent decision to walk away in the heat of battle with his balls still in tact, but you know, he was Inuyasha, when did he _ever_ make the smart decision? So instead, he sat down.

"You know, Kagome, I seem to be sitting and you seem to be standing. It would be such a complete bother for me to waist so much extra effort, when you could just walk away right now with your tail between your legs." He put his elbows on the table and let his chin rest in his hands as he looked, seemingly innocent, up at the furious girl with a smile.

She kept quiet, wondering if any of her friends would say anything on her behalf, though she knew they most likely wouldn't. They had learned long ago not to get in the middle of the squabbles between the two violent teens. They got gotten hurt many a time being careless that way. Kagome's assumptions were proven correct as her friends quietly sat there with their heads down, bangs covering their eyes, eating their sandwiches.

She looked over at Sango. Surely _she_ would say something, would she not?

"Hey, Inuyasha," Sango started after popping the last bit of her meal into her mouth.

_"Here it comes," _thought Kagome rather excitedly at the fact Sango must not have been as perturbed with her as her previous hypothesis inclined. If Sango was willing to yell at Inuyasha, then she must not have been all _that_ mad right? It wasn't that Kagome needed her friends to stand up for her per se; more that she just liked to know just where their loyalties lie…

"…were you and Miroku still planning to go to that club on Friday? Cuz if so you know I need to go too, I can't let him go anywhere without me if anything with legs and a vagina will be present."

…and apparently Sango's loyalties were _not_ with her! Fine. Sango's point was proven. She was trying to teach her some sort of lesson, which she would ponder later. But for now, "You know, Inuyasha, you really are the biggest ass."

And with that she picked up her bag and stomped off in the direction of her next class, tail hopefully not _too_ between her legs.

* * *

Kagome put her books in her locker, the ones that weren't needed for her next class, that is. The clanking sound of her books on the metal door made an echoing sound throughout the halls, her being the only one present at that time. Any other students and teachers were most likely still enjoying the remaining ten minutes to their lunch period.

She was rather enjoying the silence, that is until she heard the thud of feet hitting the ground in a speed whose sound resembled a slight jog. She looked in the direction of the oncoming person; her countenance turned into a scowl as she faced her attention back to task at hand. It wasn't so much the fact that this person was ruining her sacred quiet that irritated her, but just… the person.

_Inuyasha_.

Why the hell did he feel the need to follow her after she had let her pride crumble to the ground by just walking away? And _why_ did he still have to be rather shirtless, and rather wet, running toward her? It should really be against the law to have such a pretty enemy. And again we say _curse these human emotions_.

"Why is that you feel the need to be a stupid fucking bastard and follow me after I—"

Her sentence was cut short as she turned to face the boy who, rather intentionally it seemed, didn't stop as got close to her. Instead he continued to run at her with full force, punching her in the stomach with a swift movement of his hand. She dropped all of her things and fell to the ground. _"What the _fuck_?" _was the only thing running through head just then as a small trickle of blood made its way down the side of her cheek.

"You have _no_ fucking idea how much I have wanted to do that this whole day," he said to the ceiling as he shook out his hand in front of him. He turned his attention to Kagome as he smirked at the pitiful state she was in. She was in the fetal position at his feet, coughing up blood from the immense force of the punch to her abdomen. She thought she had the advantage now? All this means is that he'll hit her twice as hard, because he now knows she can take it. She's not some frail little human girl who could break in half if he used the full extent of his strength on her. He understood that now. She thought she'd had him all figured out? "_Well, little girl, you haven't seen nothin' yet."_

"That was for yesterday, you bitch."

"Y—you…" she shakily attempted. Getting on her hands and knees, spitting out the last of the blood that had accumulated nicely in her mouth. She stood up in a slow manner, making sure not to falter, as she didn't want Inuyasha to notice how much pain she was actually in. She wiped the remaining blood from her face, _"So _this_ is his real strength? He was holding back on me all of the other times we've fought… he was afraid he'd actually hurt me. How ironic, I was afraid I was going to hurt him as well."_

Inuyasha looked at her stone cold face, noting how she was making an extra effort not to show any signs of pain or accountable weakness. _"Yea right. As _if_ that doesn't hurt like a son of bitch." _

_"So this is how you want it, Inuyasha? No holding back?" _

They had this uncanny ability to communicate things through their eyes, _"Damn straight. Now do it!" _

"Fine!" She cried as she swallowed her pain and, with her ribs on fire, attempted a roundhouse kick to the side of his face.

She turned her body around, gaining force for her leg as it spun with her and gained height all at once. It was but an inch away from the target's head when she thought all victory was hers. He would be unconscious for _days_.

That is, he _would_ have, had not encircled his wrist around her ankle before it made contact. He had seriously stopped her attack like it was _nothing_? No fucking way! Not only had he proven her wrong as he unflinchingly stopped her efforts to kick him, but he tightened his grip preparing for his next move.

_"Shit." _He could do _anything_ to her right now. He could snap her leg in half, he could twist her ankle clear _off_, he could… well let's just say _not good things are going to happen._

He had chosen none of the pre assumed actions. It was all very fast. He lifted her up off the ground by her ankle, and _threw _her, over his head, down the hall behind him, a good ten feet. Once he had broken contact with her ankle, he didn't bother looking back as he started down the hall in the other direction, she wouldn't wake up for awhile once she hit the ground. He smiled and laughed quietly too himself,_ "How much more fun it is for me not having to worry about her frailty." _

As Kagome sailed through the air her mind was working a million miles and hour to find a solution to her current predicament. If she hit the ground going at this speed and from this height, she was going to end up very, very _not awake_.

Given her state of imminent danger, her ability reacted off its own accord once again. Her hands came together to form the power serge through her, and, as her hands hit the ground before the rest of her, they manipulated the ground to form around her as she hit it with full force. It quickly melted around her as if it were clay, then retook its solid, flat form, pushing her up slightly above ground level. Picture a bungee effect; what one's body does when falling flat onto a trampoline, and the effects of being pushed back up once hitting it.

She landed onto her feet, and without a moment's hesitation, turned around and ran at Inuyasha with full vigor. Walking down the hall, it took him a millisecond to register that Kagome was running at him. How the hell she managed to break her fall without severely injuring some part of her body was beyond him, but she was most certainly coming at him _fast_.

He turned around just in time see her fist make a rather amazing connection to his cheek, causing him to fly about ten feet in the opposite direction he previously threw her. It was her turn to shake out her hand, "And _you_ have no idea how much I've wanted to do _that_ this whole day."

She heard the bell ring, and almost immediately people started pouring into the building. She silently thanked her Lord in heaven that it hadn't rung even a minute before, or her classmates would have seen her ability act of its own accord once again. This was the second day in a row she was in danger of that; she couldn't keep getting into these heated fights with him. Though she had to admit, it felt _so_ good to be able to let loose on him; now that he knew she was different as well it didn't matter if she showed him just how abnormal her strength was.

The crowds of people surrounded her, and she couldn't help but wonder if Inuyasha was going to pop out from behind one of them and give her a blow to the head as payback. She became a little paranoid as she saw that he was, in fact, walking toward her, looking as though Satan himself had just spit on his brand new shoes. A very, very pissed boy was he.

His cheek his already starting to bruise a considerable amount, as was the back of his head freely bleeding; it was quite noticeable through the mounds of silver hair. When he reached her, instead of trying to make any sort of physical attack, he backed her up against the wall of lockers, his forearm against her neck to keep her place. The clanking sound of her back hitting the rattly metal caused many students to turn and look at the two, ready for fight to continue. "You know, Kagome, I am really get getting sick fucking tired of your bullshit."

She smiled, "Aw really? Was I the only one having the time of my life?" Grin still plastered across her face, she put her hands on his shoulders and forced their positions to be reversed. He was now up against the lockers, and a little lightheaded from the force of impact. She clasped her hands together, or at least that is what it looked like from the bystander's point of view, "But this is what I've been looking forward to all a long."

She placed her hands on the lockers on either side of his head, using her ability to maneuver a piece of the metal out to thrust against his neck, causing pain on a pressure point and the shooting of his head forward. She then made it slink back into its original place, as if it had never happened.

None of the people around could see what she had done, but the feel of the pain, and the wink Kagome allowed him communicated everything. His anger flared. How _dare_ she! What the hell was she thinking?

His eyes burned with resentment as the seething boy grabbed her shoulders and forced her back; she lost her balance after she stumbled back a few steps and slid onto the floor of an empty classroom that was located directly parallel to them, in between the break of the lockers. He pushed aside all of the people in his way as if their very existence was nothing but a hindrance to him and slammed the door so hard, Kagome could have sworn the whole room shook.

She stood up and wondered what he was thinking. Would he try and attack her? Would he attack with his own ability? She silently hoped it… then mentally noted what an odd thing that was to wish for.

She took a step toward him and opened her mouth to speak, though she could never have hoped to get anything out.

"Sit the _fuck_ down!"

_"Yes _sir_," _she thought with eyes enlarged and mouth slightly agape, taking the nearest seat.

* * *

**Well there you go! Chapter 8! Im sorry if this was too far away from the last chapter… im trying to go faster! And heres a little Inuyasha for you : )**

**To all my regular readers!!!!!!! Thank you soooo much for sticking with me this far. I'd love for you to review especially on this chapter cuz id really like to know anything youd like to see more. **

**Someone told me they wanted more surprised Inuyasha, so here you are! Hope you enjoyyyyy! **


	8. Demon

**Okay… I have no excuses. I was just not writing… please don't be upset. Updates will be regular from now on. Alright then, here we go.**

* * *

"Kagome, what the _hell_ were you thinking back there?" He paced around the empty classroom, occasionally kicking a chair and desk leg in his frustration. His hands angrily sweeping through his bangs and back through his long tresses in frustration, he looked back at her, fire dancing around the edges of his eyes.

She crossed her arms, and then one leg over the other, huffing in annoyance, "Look, it wasn't—"

"Shut your damn mouth!" He stomped up to her and leaned over so his face was dangerously close to hers. He leaned his weight onto his hands, placing them on the arms of her chair, staring menacingly into her face. He growled when his threatening disposition earned nothing more than a glare and a huff.

"No, _you _shut up, you asshat," she spat as she placed her pointer finger onto his forehead, forcing him back a few feet with the strength of her push. "You asked me a question. Is it so hard for you to let me answer it?"

Pointer and thumb clamped on the bridge of his nose, he sighed a shaky breath. He hadn't been this stunned for quite awhile. It wasn't everyday anyone, let alone a girl, challenged him as she had. They had squabbles, everyday in fact, yet she had never shown him _this_ kind of trouble. She popped up into his life around every corner, when he really needed nothing more than a little peace of mind.

She had seriously injured him, and seriously spooked him. She unleashed a can of pure, unadulterated whoop-ass on him a few days before, then showed up in his store to unleash a whole new view to their odd relationship. She knew he wasn't human, had insinuated that she was inhuman as well. He tested her strength, and was amazed at how much she could endure. He had thrown her so _far, _and yet she remained unharmed. But the most frightening thing… was she unafraid? She had _used_ her ability; she had _used _it, in front of everyone. It was an advantage to her, because he was constantly anxious. He was terrified of those that were after him, and he would be damned to hell before he would allow some two-bit ability user to take away the security he so painstakingly acquired.

Now she had the audacity to pretend as though she had done nothing wrong, nothing at all out of the ordinary.

Another sigh and a small, almost inaudible laugh, "What are you trying to prove to me?"

She quirk an eyebrow and studied him. He looked _tired_. He was slightly flushed, not from the fight, more from the tension in the room, she assumed. She wondered if she appeared flushed as well. "I am not trying to prove anything to you."

They stared at each other. A boy, with striking features that distinguished him as someone out of the ordinary, and a girl, whose powerful hands could break a city in two. They boar holes into each other, both daring the other to look away. Inuyasha blinked and leaned back onto a desk, averting his gaze to a place not yet studied, releasing a breath that was apparently being held. "You are different."

She blinked, but stared, perfectly still, eyes not moving from his face, "I am."

"And you are telling me this because…"

"I didn't say it. You did."

"Stop being stupid! What is your _deal_?" She raised an eyebrow at his temper. He was infuriated with her, then he calmed somewhat, learning that he wouldn't get answers otherwise, and then seemed to succumb to a quick rise in irritancy once again. His eyes were yet again boaring angry holes into her own, his knuckles turning a nice shade of red and white due to his grip on the desk. "Stop beating around the bush."

She smiled a bit, "Fine. You are different, I am different. I know we don't like each other that much, but let me just tell you that I find you absolutely fascinating," she took a pause and a breath, "I only know one other different person. And he looks completely human." She moved her gaze from his ears, to his claws, to his mouth, knowing his teeth were sharper than human, "Why do you appear… well, different? Different than I look?"

He could have laughed at her. The idiocy of this girl! "Kagome," he eyed her carefully from the other side of the room, "I'm not different. You're different."

Seriously? Okay, he was _obviously_ different. She hit him hard enough to kill a mortal boy. He had flinched countless times when she mentioned anything about an inhuman existence!

She was certain she were flushed now, "What the hell do you mean you're not different?" She stood with her hands balled into fists, "Don't think I'm stupid enough to believe you're human!"

His eyes turned serious. She wasn't playing; she really believed he was the same as she. He crossed his arms over his chest. Well _this_ was going to be fun to explain. "Just how stupid _are _you? I'm not human, and I'm not different." He wanted to slap that suspicious look right off her face, "I'm a demon."

A _demon_? Like a fiery pits of hell, commanded by Satan, pointy horned and red skin _demon_?

Her breath hitched in her throat. He had to be joking, a cruel, stupid attempt to make her cringe after she had told him she thought him fascinating. Well this was what she got for trying to be civil, a dumb and utterly _fascinating_ farce thrown into the mix at her expense.

Her eyes were wide, and her body was stiff, "You're a what?"

"A demon. I'm like a difference, but cooler," he smirked at her heavy glower, "I have the abilities of a difference, but I actually _appear_ different, and I have superhuman physical qualities."

"I've seen you smell the air before."

"Yes."

She quirked an eyebrow, her initial shock over. Well, he didn't _seem_ to be lying to her… the demon aspect would actually account for his odd appearance. Besides, differences were real, how hypocritical would it be of her to not believe in demons? She mulled over the idea for a couple more seconds, weighing the likeliness of his story in her mind before she sat back down, not allowing her eyes off of him. He was absolutely _captivating_.

"Are you stronger than I am? Because you are a demon?"

"Yes."

"That sucks." She frowned.

"For you, yea."

She studied his ears. '_For hearing better… duh.'_ She studied his fangs and claws. _'A superhuman quality. Demons must be able to tear through things with their teeth and nails. Well… that's kinda cool.'_

"Can you run really fast?"

"Yes, but so can you. I'm just faster. That's an advantage to being a demon," he stated smugly. If she didn't know better, she would have said he was puffing out his chest in a proud manner. "Just as a difference can do everything a human can, but better, faster, stronger, more efficient, a demon can doing anything a difference can do… but better."

She ignored his last statement. She traded irritancy for awe, as she stood and walked up to him, stopping a little too close for his comfort. "This is so _cool_… you're a demon. A real, live, bonafied demon." She walked around him in circles, looking him up and down. He had to say he kind of enjoyed it, not that he'd admit it to her. This was the first time in his entire existence that someone thought of him as _neat_ for being a demon. Most ran from him as a child, it was odd for someone to be admiring his true demon qualities. He was used to girls admiring his looks, but they couldn't see his nails, fangs and ears—

Ears that she was now touching, tweaking with her fingers for her sparkling eyes. She was acting as a small child would in the presence of a kitten. And he was acting as the kitten would have, had its ears been scratched in the same way his were at the moment.

He closed his eyes for a minute, forgetting where he was and just who was touching what. It had been so _long_ since anyone came anywhere near such a soft spot of his. Not since his mother…

His eyes shot open and he shook his head, effectively causing Kagome to remove her hands. She raised her eyebrows and put up her hands in mock defense as she watched him shake out his hair, "Well sor-_ry_, alright? You just don't see a boy with dog ears everyday, you know."

A low grumble resided in his throat as he crossed his arms and glared at her. She was so _not allowed_ to touch his ears.

"Did you just purr?"

He could have sputtered. He mentally congratulated himself on the fact that he didn't, "What? No! I _growled_ at you. As in, I'm angry!" He tensed his arms and resisted the urge not to cause some sort of bodily harm to her with his claws. Her stupid furrowed brow and stupid pouty lip did nothing but make him want to hit her more. "Just don't touch my fucking _ears_, you got that?" He averted his gaze to a more settling place on the floor beside him as he mumbled something along the lines of 'stupid bitch… touching my ears…'

Oh come on, as _if_ she couldn't hear him.

"Well, I never!" She pondered what would happen if she tackled him to the floor, poking his ears every chance she got, just to prove talking to her like that would accomplish nothing. But then she remembered, he wasn't out to accomplish anything with this newfound civility between them, she was. She vaguely pictured violence ensuing if she pursued said thought of stroking his ears again. But then again, she wanted her questions answered, so she thought against it, no matter _how_ compelling it might have been.

And it was pretty damn compelling.

She dismissed the thought altogether and sighed. "So… you're a demon. You still have an ability though, right?"

He released the tension in his shoulders, appreciating the change in topic, "Yes."

She stared at him for a few moments, unblinking. "Well?"

"Well what?"

Her gaze turned into a glare, though it was to be expected. This conversation was getting a little too social for her taste anyway. Was he stupid or something? "Are you stupid or something? I _mean_ well are you going to show it me or tell me what it is."

He smirked; she would have missed the mischievous twinkle that entered then left his eye if she'd blinked. But she didn't, and she definitely saw it. He wasn't going to make this easy for her. "I could. But I don't think I will."

She pinched the bridge of her nose. "Just _show_ me, you ass."

His gaze moved to the ceiling, then out in front of him as he pretended to inspect his fingernails. He looked bored. "What'll you do for me if I do?"

She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists, "How about I won't _kill_ you?"

"Naw."

"Inuyasha!"

"You forget that I'm still pissed at you." He eyed her from under his bangs as he leaned against a conveniently placed desk a few yards away, "You used your ability in plain sight, Kagome." The seriousness of his tone sort of unnerved her. It was one thing for them to be hostile towards each other, that was something she was accustomed to, but for him to take a serious tone, now that was something he hadn't yet gotten used to.

"No one saw it," she countered.

"But they _could have_. You can't go around doing that. It's stupid."

"Oh please. Don't act all superior now as if you're the only one who knows how to live. I got into this school didn't I? I think that proves I'm not as careless as you're insinuating," she shot back. "I think I deserve a little credit."

"I'll give you credit when you're not being _stupid_." He huffed and closed his eyes as he turned his face away from her. She fumed, _damn_ that superior attitude of his!

"You were ignoring me! How else was I supposed to get your attention?" Her voice was thick with agitation. What was it about his boy that brought bout that absolute worst in her?

"I wasn't ignoring you. I was acting the same as I always did. I just wasn't talking about what _you _wanted to talk about," he argued.

She was about to snap back, but then stopped as his statement registered. He wasn't wrong. He _had_ been acting normal. She just figured that something was supposed to change now that he knew she were different. But really, what exactly was is that was expecting? Them to hug and cry and say they really weren't as alone as they previously thought? Then again, though, when she had realized he were different she hadn't done anything about it; it had taken her years to fess up, to even hint that she knew anything. Why should she expect a different reaction from him when once she dropped the hints?

"Well, whatever."

"Wow, what an intellig—"

She held her hand up, propped up against her other hand which lay across her stomach; she was leaning as well. It was a silent plea for him to just please, for _once_, not insult her. It was her turn to be serious. She really, truly, wanted to find out about what made him tick. She had known several differences when she was younger, but they had all disappeared over time. Her worst fear realized, she assumed she, too, would be taken just as they had. She wanted to know all she could before that day came. After all, how long could they _really_ hide who they were?

"I just wanted to talk to you about it was all." She was surprised at the own softness of her voice. It wasn't weak, just, yielding? "I just want to know what your ability is."

To say he was surprised was an understatement. That was the closest thing to defeat he thought he would ever get in concern to this girl. Anything close to that emotion had been revealed only a few years ago, many emotions just like it, if not that exact one. His mind flashed briefly to that moment, the turning point for them, how guilty he felt as she stared at him with a horrified expression, heat radiating out of every pore; she looked ready to pounce, ready to _destroy_ him for everything he was. But it wasn't anger he was faced with, well no, there was anger, but the dominant emotion was something akin to the one she had just temporarily shown. Something that made him break a little on the inside; that confrontation had not been a pleasant one, a painful experience more like, in more ways than one. That emotion being exposed to him had been the turning point in their relationship, a slow and steady climb to the hate and vicious behavior they shared now. And now, she was showing it again, but he was not willing to allow any sort of change to occur this time. It was so much… _easier_ to deal with her when she was angry with him. It was easier on him, and he imagined it was easier on her.

So that's how it would stay. But he did feel he owed it to her to at least allow of her what she had asked. She had taken this pain-staking leap, the leap of overcoming her resentment toward him, of getting him in this room so she could speak with him about a matter that called for civility. Now that he thought about it, this was all probably some sort of elaborate trap. No matter how deadeset he was on not bringing up this topic, no matter how determined he was on not speaking to her, she had gotten her way. Well _that_ was a little irritating, if anything. But all of it aside, he would speak with her, and then everything would go back to the way it should be. The way that was easiest for him, at least, to cope.

With a steady release of breath, he uncrossed his arms and let his palms rest against the desk, a prop-up for his body. "Okay, um…"

He was fidgeting, and _stalling._ Why was he fidgeting and stalling? "Why are you fidgeting and stalling?"

He scratched the back of his neck, "Just hold on a second will you? I'm going to show you."

She waited a few seconds, growing quickly tired of whatever it was he was trying to pull. "Well? Are you going to _do_ something?" Her response was an icy glare from the boy in front of her. She sighed, "Well what's the problem?"

He looked at the floor, admiring his shoes, hand still on the back of his neck, "It's just… you can't _see_ my ability. You can only feel them when the damage is done. You can see the _results_ of them, after they have already cut you. I don't know why, but I can't deny it's helpful; it makes it so I nearly never miss. Kind of hard to dodge something you can't see."

She quirked an eyebrow, "So you make invisible blades of some sort?"

He nodded, "Yup."

She cocked her head to the side, "But you can't _see_ the blades, so your opponent is basically a sitting duck from the second he picks a fight with you."

Another nod, "Pretty much, yea."

"Well that's a handy skill."

"Yes it is."

She was doing that thing again where she was staring at him expectantly. He felt like she wanted him to say something or do something further, though he hadn't the slightest inclination as to what it could be. What was with this girl? Automatically assuming he knew what she was thinking… why were _all girls_ like that?

She looked like she could be tapping her foot. "Well?"

He rolled his eyes, "Would you stop doing that? Stop assuming I know what you want from me every time you look at me like that."

Her eyes rolled as well, "_Well_ don't you want to know what my ability is?"

_Yes._ "No."

She blanched. She was _definitely_ taken aback, a little infuriated as well. "You're not even a little curious?"

_Yes. So, _so _much_. "Nope."

She wanted to hit him. "Can you at least _humor me_ and ask? So I don't feel so stupid for being all interested-sounding in yours?"

Oh, she was making his life much too easy. Here it was, the point where their once in a lifetime serious talk would come to an end, and their hatred and rage fueled relationship would once again commence. This was how it was supposed to be. "Oh, but Kagome, it's okay, you _are_ stupid."

Oh, never mind, scratch 'want', she was _going_ to hit him. "Fine!" She slapped her hands together, causing a pink light the form in an electricity around them, "How about I'll just show you while _killing_ you with it?" She mentally fumed; here she was, trying to make a form of peace with this class A asshat, and he didn't even have the decency to _humor_ her.

In a huff, she allowed a sly smile to spread across the entirety of her face. It was a full-fledged grin, she was sure; she was actually excited to see how he would react to her. With a scoff in his direction she slammed her left hand onto the wall beside her. The light from her hand traveled down the wall to the connected floor, and over to Inuyasha, where he stood in an interested shock.

Though it all happened in a flash, it seemed like several minutes to him, as he stared at the floor beneath him, only to have his laziness punished as the tiled jetted out towards him, shaping itself to the will of Kagome as it took the form of a blunt spike from the ground, hitting him square in the forehead. It wasn't enough to crack his skull, as his mind and instincts had kicked it into high gear the second the ground began to move. He jumped back, landing with what would have been perfect prestige on the teacher's desk in a crouching position.

It _would_ have been perfect prestige, had his mind not been screaming at him in pain from the grunt of the attack. He allowed a hissing sound to escape his lips as he clenched his eyes shut. He pressed his palm to his head, where the tile floor had hit so flawlessly, as he pictured many scenarios, each one with a gruesome death befalling Kagome.

"You know what I do, Inuyasha?" He hardly had time to move as a piece of the wall jetted out behind him, he sprung from his crouching position onto the floor. "I command elements." Another one appeared, just beneath him. It paid to be a demon; he could sense where her power was forming a millisecond before it happened. As the spike ejected, he jumped up, placing one foot on top of it as he allowed it to propel him into the air. It was hard to move around in this small room, but he landed a back flip seamlessly onto another desk just as well.

"Oh, and not just some elements. All of them. Elements in _general_. I can make reactions, physical, or chemical." While she was talking, she allowed her lower brain functions be a little bit amazed at how flawlessly her opponent moved. At first she had been holding back, but now she was actually making the spikes appear mere seconds apart, and none after the first had hit. How was he so _springy_?

"I've only mastered physical at the moment, which is what you see here. But think about what I could do with the knowledge of how to make a chemical change! The possibilities are _endless_!" She could have laughed manically, but she thought against it. Though she had to admit that she was having the time of her life, making him sweat as he jumped from corner to corner, attempting to avoid her blows. And all she had to do was stand there; her breath was hardly uneven from just moving one piece of earth at a time. He deserved this, she mused, he was just so _infuriating_. And here she thought they could possibly get through a simple conversation without trying to kill each other—

And just like that, he was gone. "What the he—?" She couldn't even finish swearing before her hand was forcefully removed from the wall and twisted behind her back. From the force of the twist, she could assume the person doing it was fairly unhappy.

"Okay! I _get_ it, already," he grunted as he held both hands securely behind her; there was really nothing she could do to him like that, which was rather fortuitous for him, as he desperately needed to catch his breath. But then he raised his eyebrows, and a smirk took over his face, "So you really can't do anything if your hands are tied down, can you?"

"Well, not ability wise, no. But don't you go thinking that makes me helpless." What happened next astonished and, well, made him want to throw up his breakfast all at once. Apparently, her bones didn't work the same way his did… because she lifted him up, _over her head from behind her_, and threw him against the opposing wall.

He didn't even have the strength to left himself up, all of that bouncing around to avoid her attacks had really tired him out. Did she have an endless supply of energy or _what_? This girl kind of… freaked him out, to say the least… he was perfectly happy living as a heap on the floor at the moment, while he allowed her to explain herself.

She chuckled with a hand on her shoulder socket, rolling her shoulders around a few times, "Double jointed. Pretty nifty huh?"

He just stared at her, mouth agape. "You may be a demon, but I'm your basic definition of a circus freak. So maybe we're even."

He started to get up, but she didn't immediately go on the defensive, much to his irritation, but only continued talking, "You may have super-human agility and speed, but that could be considered a little mundane in comparison to the fact that _all_ of my joints dislocate."

She smiled at his open mouth and large eyes. His face hadn't really changed all that much, "There aren't many effective positions you could trap me in that I can't get out of."

Wow. She had just _dislocated_ her shoulders and lifted him _over her head_ to throw him. He was appalled that her strength might rival his own; he was allowed to find it weird, as he was a boy, _and_ a demon, both of which she was not. "That is… _so_ awesome," he couldn't stop himself from saying.

She smirked, "Yea."

He shrugged, his strength already rebooting from the rest, "But you haven't seen _my_ ability yet."

Her body tensed. Oh, _shit._ "But I thought you weren't going to show me."

He grinned, "Yea, well, I changed my mind." And with that, he lifted his pointer finger and thumb to his face. Well _that_ certainly wasn't the threatening move she was expecting. He pierced his pointer claw lightly into his thumb, drawing a bit of his blood, allowing it to run down his finger. Her breath hitched, and not a moment too soon; he flicked his claw in her direction, and for a second nothing happened... until the pain was forcibly swept over her; a piece of her leg felt like it was being torn from her flesh.

She gasped in shock and fell to the floor, clutching the torn appendage. It wasn't a serious wound, but it sure hurt enough for fire to burn a hole through his skull with the intensity of her glare, "What the _fuck _did you just do?"

He licked his thumb wiping the excess blood, eyes twinkling with satisfaction, "I told you, you don't know it's coming until it hits you."

Her bangs where covering her eyes, and he could have sworn she were growling. Did girls growl? He didn't girls growled. "Are you grow—?"

He didn't really expect she would allow him to finish his question, and she most definitely didn't.

She pounced. Well, more like jumped _at_ him from her position on the floor. She must have been pissed to high heaven too, because she flung herself at him so hard, they both crashed through the door with the force of their bodies. Through the sting of the impact his back made to the now fairly broken, metal door, he briefly wondered if the school would make him pay for the damages, not that he _would_. Those torn hinges would be a pretty hefty fine… ah, he'd just blame it on Kagome.

He was surprised to see that their classmates were still wondering the halls. Most of them now running toward them so see what damaged the two had caused _this_ time. They must have been in that room for under ten minutes, as the passing period was not yet over. He mentally laughed at how quickly their 'civil chat' had started and ended.

This was how it was supposed to be, he mused. Nice and violent, certainly not some sort of interpretation of the word 'civil'.

He landed on the floor with a thud. His back pain now doubled from the impact into the door, and now his happily crumpled body hitting the floor with the force of Kagome _launching _herself at him, a repeat of their daily confrontations.

He cringed through the pain and the noise from his cheering classmates, _"Yes, this is how it supposed to be," _he thought with a small smile, dodging her fist as it came toward his face.

* * *

**Yet again, I am so sorry. I won't make you wait this long ever again.**

**And also, please review for this chapter, because I started this like one and half years ago, and if you remember my writing style back then… well, not so good. I'm starting an edit project. I'm going to be editing all of the chapters. So tell me what you think of this one's structure, and if you wouldn't mind the other one's being similar. **

**Thank you! This time off has given me a long time to think! And I really think you'll like the new ideas! **

**Review and you'll be my favorite forever : )**


	9. Drugs

Kagome walked slowly down the street, hands in her pockets, head down. Her breath was released in the form of a white steam. _"Stupid… fucking cold…"_ Stars twinkled above, though she hardly thought to admire their beauty, as her mind was just on other things. After her fight with Inuyasha, she had gone to the bathroom to clean herself off. She healed her leg, as she couldn't think of one _good_ reason to allow it to bleed all over her for the rest of the day.

She called Sango from the bathroom, who promptly answered her phone from class. She was already healing the slash in her leg from Inuyasha's invisible ability when the girl's irate 'hello?' sounded from the other end of the phone. Kagome had labored breaths, a few struggled whimpers here and there, which results in Sango's countenance to change completely. She remembered the pain, she _always _remembered the pain. She cringed at the recollection. All she had managed to tell the girl on the other end was 'I'm in the bathroom…' before she passed out onto the floor, only to be woken up by a shot of Epinephrine five minutes later. Kagome always kept some in her bag.

Yes, she supposed it paid to have a life threatening condition when prescription drugs were involved. Prescription drugs that worked just _swimmingly_ to counter the weakness she suffered from healing herself. Though Sango thought it were due to the Septicemia, Kagome just couldn't bring her self to tell her best friend what it were really for. And even so, Kagome now had a best friend that was no longer mad at her, as she had completely traded her irritation for worry and that, _that_ was what really mattered.

She sighed, the rest of her scrapes and bruises had already healed themselves. So, apparently, being different was also a blessing; insignificant injuries healed themselves in a day at the most, much to Kagome's pleasure.

She didn't feel _spiffy_ at the moment, but she felt fine enough to stay at school well into the hours of the night with Riley. He had been showing her different chemical bonds and what would happen if yadda yadda yadda. He mixed _this_ element and _that_ element which would make _this_ ionic bond or _this_ polyatomic ion… which would result in a chunky substance, a suspension, or would simply bleed together… stuff like that. It ended up that they stayed in that chemistry room for longer than they'd thought, because it was now becoming dangerously close to nine o' clock.

She bit her lip, allowing her thoughts to wonder back to the topic that had plagued since it had become an issue. Inuyasha was a _demon_. She didn't know demons even existed, but then again, maybe he wasn't the fiery depths of hell kind. He didn't _seem_ like the fiery depths of hell kind, though he did have this uncanny ability to make Kagome's life resemble the fiery depths of hell…

Demon. _Demon_. De-mon. Deeeeeem-on. Dem_on_.

Huh. Weird.

"Holy _shit_ it's fucking cold!" She had to clench her teeth to keep her mouth from the uncontrollable twitching.

"You want my jacket?"

Kagome almost jumped out of her skin. Inuyasha _sucked_ and while she pondered this finite, little factor she seemed to have forgotten Riley's existence, as he was walking right beside her, hands in his pockets, staring at her with a smile.

Charming smile.

Pretty, nice, _fucking gorgeous_ smile.

She shook her head, "No. Keep your stupid jacket," she grunted, allowing a pout to overtake the better part of her countenance. She turned her head away from the pre-offered warmth and studied the ground beneath her feet. Her feet were freezing even within her boots. _Left, right, left, right…_stupid, not warm boots. She mentally cursed herself. It were times like these that Kagome wished she had succumbed to the fashion and purchased herself a pair of those disgusting, fuzzy, brown boot-slipper-things that everyone seemed to be so infatuated with.

Ugg-_ly,­ _­more like.

Damn her stupid, retarded taste… it was genetically engineered to detest anything that was in style, she figured. It could possibly be her insatiable urge to stand out in whichever way that was physically possible to her, seeing as how her entire life was basically a lie, her different ability hidden away for none to witness courtesy of the ever so _beloved_ government.

Acting out. Finding ways to _win_ even under so much suppression. Winning was acting out, and acting out was being noticed, and being noticed was being unique, and being unique was _not_ dressing the same way as everyone else. No one _else_ wore red lipstick, no one _else_ wore a leather jacket, no one _else_ wore black boots…

So there. She was Kagome. _No one else. _And everyone better be damn sure to recognize that.

Riley smiled again at the girl next to him. He had been reprimanding her for acting so rude in the face of a kind gesture. Telling her why it was wrong, and what she _should_ have done. Through his entire tirade, she hadn't made any sort of inclination that she had heard a single word out of his mouth. This was what caused his grin, he was talking right next to her, straight _at_ her, yet she hadn't heard a single word. There she went again… entering into her own thoughts, getting lost, only to never find her way out and to never be seen again.

He scratched the back of his neck. "I wonder what your thinking about in there," he said allowed, only to attain no reaction from the girl. He contemplated taking his fist to her head, knocking on it a few times, not only to prove a point, but also because he figured he'd get a huge kick out of it. He also contemplated the intensity of the pain that was sure to be inflicted upon his person after completing said act.

Was it worth it?

Statistics say no, no it was not.

He resorted to the old fashioned method instead. He snapped his fingers near her ear, "Kagome. _Kagome._ Kagome?"

_"Man, Inuyasha sucks… man, school sucks… man, not being born with infinite knowledge of the laws of time and space sucks..."_

"…Ka-go-me. Kago—"

"Man, life sucks."

Riley could have exploded. "Kagome!"

No response. Riley traded his impending happy explosion for slow, upsetting death. She just shifted a little, and removed her arms from being crossed, sliding them down into her pockets; that was it. He sighed.

She could live with goose bumps, but her hands were falling _off_ they were so cold. She moved them around in the pockets of her jeans, jeans that were now torn in several places thanks to that dog-eared jackass. Stupid, damn, shitty as ass, mother _fucking_ ripped jeans. Stupid, fucking _cold_… ripped jeans.

Stupid, fucking _Inuyasha_… _ripping_ her stupid, fucking cold, ripped jeans.

And, holy freaking _crap_, stupid fucking _Riley_ saying her name every two damned seconds! Did he honestly think she couldn't hear him? Did it ever occur to him that maybe she were _ignoring_ him? She hated everything. Today was not her day. This week was not her _week_. _"I hate my life, I hate my life, I hate my life, I hate my life…"_

Holy…

Seriously? Was he seriously, honest to _God_, poking her now? He was. He was _poking_ her, repeatedly, in the arm. If her arms weren't frozen she would have pinched the bridge of her nose in a glorious, frustration-releasing gesture. _Or_, she could possibly skip the pinching all together, and release her ever increasing infuriation by acquainting her fist with his nose by means of a rather beautifully executed upper cut, successfully jamming the bone that makes his nose look like a _nose_ into his skull, effectively killing him, effectively ending the incessant prodding.

But then, she couldn't do that. There was no way to make that look like an accident.

She stared at her breath as she witnessed the white of cold and warm mixing together. She could have screamed! Since when was it this cold? Seriously, since _when_? That's it. She was done. What was tomorrow? Friday. Crap. Ah, well. Couldn't be helped. She'd just go to school feeling like shit. No harm done, right?

"Kagome. Kagome. Kagome. Kagome. Kago—"

"You wanna party tonight?" She looked up at his risen eyebrows. He looked down at her irate and slightly exhausted-looking eyes, efficiently causing him to whip his arm back down to his sides as if she had been… _Satan_, or something. Well there went his fun poking time. Though it was for the best; exhausted Kagome meant anything and everything was deemed insufferable. And if something were insufferable, it was to be _destroyed_. There was no arguing with her at this point in the game. And, he had to admit, gettin' a little groove on never hurt anybody.

Oh, oh _no_. Dear _God_. Did he really just use the word groove?

Wow… how old was he again? 22. "Well _that's_ not good…" he murmured to himself. Perhaps a drink or seven _was_ in order.

"What?"

"Nothing. Yea, let's do it."

She released the tension in her arms, as much as the cold would allow. The poking had stopped, she was with her best friend, she was going to a party, and Inuyasha was _not_ going to be there. Things were looking up. "Okay then, it's settled."

She smiled a little, amidst her physically and emotional cold disposition. At the risk of sounding like a cheesy romance novel, Riley didn't say anything about how beautiful she looked, with that bit of light in her face. He didn't find fit to mention how adorable she appeared when she pouted, or how amazing it made him feel when she'd throw even the smallest smile in his direction. A dazzling one was enough to make him melt, successfully giving him the likeness if a puddle.

But no, he didn't utter a word of that. Instead, he wrapped his arm around her, pulling her close to him, as he rubbed her arms with his gloved hands to warm her up. He wondered if she were having the same flash backs, back to four years prior, when she had been so fragile. Back then he had performed this gesture because he knew she needed it, needed someone to protect her and to love her, to show her that she were cared for. But now, four years later, he did it because _he _needed it. He needed her close to him, to feel the warmth of her body. This girl had become apart of him… his best friend, his confidante, his student, and his Kagome.

His love.

* * *

Kagome kicked the front door, grinning wilding as it flew open and slammed into the wall on the other side. Sango watched her friend with her eyebrows raised. "Hey Kagome. Feeling bett—"

Why bother finishing? Kagome was already around the corner and she heard the sickening crack of the bathroom door slamming into its frame. She let out a breath, well, if Kagome could bolt like _that_ into the house she must be feeling fine. "Stupid girl… she could have at least closed the door behind her… the hall's freaking freezing…" she mumbled to herself as she stood up and walked to said door, only to be met with a muscular chest as it rounded the corner. She looked up and cocked her eyebrow. It was Riley; why Riley was standing in her doorway, well, she didn't find it completely odd, but still, _why_?

"Damn it," he panted, "she won. She _always_ wins." When Sango stepped back, Riley allowed fatigue to take over as he bent down, placing one hand on his knee and the other on the doorframe to brace himself. "Shit. That girl can climb stairs like no other."

Sango smirked, "Escorting my young, sick friend home, Mr. Buller?" She observed his hands on the doorframe, which were gloved, and his heavy jacket, zipped to the top around his body. It must have been glacial outside. Damn that idiot friend of hers, she came home dressed in a freaking tank top. Why did she pick today of all days to _not_ wear a jacket,_ and_ to stay so late at school?

She then mentally kicked herself. Kagome was a big girl, and she could take care of herself. She shook her head and looked toward the shut bathroom door, she just had this damn motherly possessiveness over the girl whenever she had one of her episodes. It had been awhile since one had happened at school.

Riley straightened himself, "Hey, if you mock me its one big failing grade for you, smart ass." He then proceeded to smile and motion the girl into his arms. Sango complied and hugged her teacher and surrogate friend.

She looked up at him with a small smile, "But I'm your favorite smart ass, huh?"

He thought for a moment, "I supposed so… but then what would that make Kagome?"

He waited… she cocked her head to the side. Wait for it… she narrowed her eyes. Wait wait wait… Her eyes widened as she pushed him away from her. There we go… "You are so _mean_!"

Riley couldn't help but laugh at the red tint of her cheeks. He also couldn't help but be rather surprised at the girl's strength; had he not caught himself with his hands firmly grasped onto either side of the doorframe, he could have easily been thrust to the opposing, parallel side of the hall. _That_ would have hurt considerably more than his now burning hands.

Sango stared at him with her hands placed steadfastly to her hips. It had taken her a moment to realize that he had just called Kagome his favorite in a rather blunt comparison between the two girls. _"Not that I didn't already know that…" _She shook her head and corrected her own mental statement, _"Not that _anyone _with two eyes and a brain didn't already know that…"_

She looked toward the bathroom door, which was now starting to open. Oh wait, scratch that, the first millisecond it was ajar, the _second_ millisecond it was kicked open to, one, reveal a very made up Kagome, and two, to be thrust against the doorframe via her best friend's usual, misguided vigor. She sighed and looked at her feet, eyes closed and head slowly shaking once more; did she not _realize_ that eventually people were going to start complaining about the random loud bangs? Or that she was going to break the door? Or the wall? Or the… _roof_ or something equally as important?

She looked at her beaming friend then quirked an eyebrow, "Kagome, when did you change? Did you just _spawn_ those clothes when you were in the bathroom? Cuz I'm almost positive you didn't go into your bedro—"

"Sango…" Kagome started, cutting the girl off and looking her up and down, "you're not going out like that are you?" Sango frowned and stared down at her own apparel, consisting of a white t-shirt she had bought at a concert when she was fifteen and a pair of sweat pants that didn't belong to her. They actually might have belonged to Kagome… though she couldn't remember seeing her lounging about her house in them. Maybe they were Koga's. Was it weird that Sango was wearing her best friend's boyfriend's clothes? But then again maybe they weren't even hi— "Your silence leads me to believe you are. So please don't be offended when I walk a few paces ahead of you."

Removed from her contemplative daze, she looked up, "What?"

"Well I'm sorry, but I can't be seen outdoors with my best friend looking like that…" She allowed her statement to trail off as she jogged the few, short paces to the kitchen only to stop at fridge and whip it fiercely open.

Sango winced at the loud, clanking sound that erupted throughout the room as the bottles on the side of the door knocked against each other. She thought back to the front door, the bathroom door, the refrigerator door… she made a mental note to teach Kagome that her actions had repercussions, something that the girl had most likely been blinded to since birth. But then again, she also remembered every conversation they had ever had about think-before-you-do.

_Kagome! What the hell?_

_Relax, would ya? The door is fine._

_Stop being stupid, that's not what I'm talking about._

_Then please, _mother, _would you _please_ enlighten me as to what you _are _talking about?_

_The wall, Kagome. The wall! _

_What's the matter with the wall?_

_When you open the door like that you're not just hurting the door. You're hurting the wall too. Have you not stopped to think that the door slams _into _the wall?_

_Sango, we're going in circles. I just told you the door is fine._

Every single time. Maybe insert two different objects and substitute a few new verbs, and that basically summed up the extent of Kagome's willingness to understand. The frustrating thing was that she wasn't even aware of it, so Sango couldn't stay mad at her when she did something stupid or it would be deemed as an unfair and totally uncalled for cold shoulder. Sango would have _loved_ to ignore Kagome for the rest of the week for how she treated Koga, basically lying to his face and not caring when she so hastily broke her promise.

Kagome was the door. The force of Kagome's push was the alcohol and the drugs. Koga was the wall. Every time Kagome drank or thizzed or anything else of that kind, yea, sure, she was convinced she was perfectly fine. Koga, however, was being crushed every time she popped a pill or railed whatever handy shit was crushable. And though she was fine for the time being, if she kept getting smashed into that wall, she would eventually break as well. Not that she was willing to look two yards ahead of her damned nose to avoid the danger that was looming so close.

"_Hey, you know what else is so uncanny in this juxtaposition of situations?" _she asked herself, as if something inside her head would answer her. It didn't. She continued anyway, "_The door is an intimate object. It has a pretty damn good reason to not think about its actions. Kagome, however, is not. So what's _her_ fucking excuse?_

_Ha, idiot best friend._

_Idiot best friend that's not always gonna have me to clean up her crap."_

She scratched the back of her neck, smirking, and slowly slipping out of her thoughts as she found the matter of assessing the current situation more pressing. What the hell was going _on_ anyway?She looked over at Riley, who was quite noticeably staring down his student's protruding ass as she was bent down at the waist, searching through the cramped refrigerator.

"Riley."

No movement. She balled her hands into tightly clenched fists at the lack of response.

"_Riley._"

She walked in front of the boy and put her hands to her hips. When finally he looked at her with his eyebrows raised, she relaxed a little instead of assuming the fighting stance that would have been very necessary had he looked right around her to continue his shameless staring. In that case, she would have had to hit him. So, good job, Riley, for saving her knuckles, and yourself, a little pain.

"Where are you guys going?"

He was about to answer, but Kagome popped in next to him with the bottle she had obtained the day before from Inuyasha's little store. "Party," she stated with a smile. She hopped with each step to the couch, happily humming to herself as she opened the bottle. "I'll wait for three point five minutes for you to get ready."

After Sango had retreated to the bedroom, Kagome patted the seat next to her, motioning for Riley to join her as she took a swig. As the top of the container left her lips she realized that she definitely did _not_ have it in her to contain the look of disgust and noticeable shivering sensations that made their way down her arms as the alcohol slid down her throat. She coughed a little and wiped her mouth, "I'll just say this now. That stuff is strong as anything, and it tastes like shit, but _fuck_ does it get the job done fast."

Riley couldn't help but allow a smile at his friend's cute antics, he also couldn't help but permit a bigger smile once Sango walked out, looking as beautiful and sexy as ever. Amazing what a girl could do in three and a half minutes. _Man _did he love these girls.

Said sexy girl didn't even attempt to hide her laughter as she grabbed the bottle and took a sip herself, "Even I can get it down without flinching. Kagome, you are _pathetic_."

"Well!" She sprang from her seat, "I never!"

Sango jumped back quickly to avoid Kagome's skilled attack. Kagome laughed as she kicked and flailed and attempted to grab the other girl. Riley laughed as Sango dodged everything that Kagome threw out, much to her chagrin. And Sango laughed while taking a drink every time Kagome left an opening for her to do so, just to prove that she'd never be able to win against her with such sloppy attempts as those. But, it was all in good fun and Sango cheekily declared, while backing slowly toward the door, "And you won't even be able to make me eat those words."

"Oh yea? And why is that? You can't dodge forever." Kagome smiled with play malicious intent as she panted profusely from a few yards away.

Sango felt the doorknob behind her back, "Because you may be able to run up stairs faster than Riley… but I can run _down_ stairs way faster than you!" And with that, she winked, thrust open the door and bolted out of the apartment.

It took Kagome about a millisecond longer than she would have liked to react, but she was out the door running after her in the blink of an eye once she had registered what was going on. This was basically an exciting car chase. She should have set up background music. Crap.

Riley stood there wondering why, if they had just come to the conclusion that he could never catch either of them, they were running away at top speed. He shook his head slowly as he closed the door, locking it for the hasty girls, then proceeded to run down the hall. He could hear the pounding of feet as they ran down the metal stairs and the echoes of their excited and fatigue ridden words.

"Sango, you hypocrite! You totally just slammed the door against the wall!"

"Fine, then catch me and make me regret it!"

He winced as a heard a rather menacing crash.

"Ahh! Damnit all!"

He could almost see it in his mind's eye as Kagome most definitely tripped and fell. He knew he should have been worried for her safety, but he was mostly just running faster with glee and the thought that maybe now he could catch her.

Ohh, the wishful thinking.

* * *

Sango was enjoying herself. Like really, really enjoying herself. And though she was enjoying herself, she couldn't help the twinges of jealousy that were so rudely popping in and out of her mind. She took in her surroundings and _man_, it just was all sorts of unfair for an apartment to be this nice. She was at a bar, complete with complimentary beautiful, scantily clad bartender, sitting on a very, _very_ expensive looking leather seat. If she looked to her right there was a balcony overlooking extraordinarily pretty lights from the streets below, if she looked to her left there were the softest looking love seats with the most love-struck looking couples in them _loving_ each other… a lot. If she looked up there was a fucking _chandelier. _If she looked down she saw a perfectly plush looking white carpet that she had the urge to roll around on only clad in a thong and a bra, or, you know, naked.

She wasn't drunk enough for that yet.

And then, the final hoorah, if she looked forward she saw Kagome. And true to her best friends nature, she was the life of the party. She was dancing in the middle of the floor, a joint in one hand, a beer in the other. She was screaming and laughing and probably singing as loud as she could, though the louder music mostly drowned her out.

Damn that girl. Ah, whatever. Let her have her fun. Still though, Sango couldn't shake the feeling that she was somehow betraying Koga for not only allowing Kagome to party, but partying _with_ her.

Ah shit. She hated internal battles like this. "And what better way to deal with something you don't like than avoiding it all together?" That said, she downed her drink, said her thanks to the chick behind the bar and stood up. Her plans were to head to the dance floor, but hot _damn_. There must have been a healthy amount of 151 in that drink.

Sango giggled; she was gonna be feeling that soon.

* * *

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Kagome saw her partner in crime heading towards the dance floor. She winced and stumbled to the edge of the sweaty, grinding bodies. As twisted as she was, it was not enough. It was _never _enough. She needed something more, and knew for damn sure that Sango wouldn't let her partake in what 'more' she found.

She moved to find Bankotsu. He always had something interesting. Now, where the hell was the short bastard? If she knew the boy, and she was sure as shit that she did, he would be in a dark corner, dealing something to someone somewhere…

Guilt tugged at the back of her mind. What was she doing? She had promised Koga hadn't she? No more of… anything… Just the thought was enough to make her groan. Holy fuck did he understand not what he was asking for. But she had promised him. _Damnit _why had she promised? And now here she was, ducking the girl that was trying to help her, trying to keep her most trusted friend from making an overly stupid decision.

The world was spinning a little. Where the hell was Riley?

"Stupid, shitty guilt." Her stomach tied in knots as she viewed her boyfriend's face in the back of her mind. She imagine him doing drugs, meth, more specifically, and it almost broke her heart. She braced herself against a wall. He had tried so hard to break the habit, to break it for _her_. Because _she_ didn't want to see him hurt. And now… oh hell, the wall was moving.

The wall was moving… wait, what th— Kagome went crashing to the floor, landing on all fours. Who the _crap_ decided to open the door? She hated them. _Oh,_ how she hated them. And this feeling in her stomach, the guilt, how she hated that even more. Was is supposed to hurt this badly? Like this literal, physical pain… this wasn't like any guilt she felt before.

Oh, _shit_. Realization dawned and her eyes went wide as she spilled the contents of stomach onto the floor. The tingling release she felt after sullying the beautiful carpet with stomach acid and liquor; man it felt good. "Guilt my ass," she managed to choke out as she spit the residue from her mouth.

"Wow, sweetheart. You can feel guilt? Well, that's a whole lot of guilt if I've ever seen it."

She looked up, surprised to see none other than Bankotsu smirking back at her. She wiped her mouth, "Oh, Bank, I narrowly missed your shoes."

He extended a hand to the girl he so respected, "Yea well, you're too drunk to have good aim," he laughed and pulled Kagome unto a hug. She eagerly complied. After a kiss to his cheek he kept an arm around the girl to brace her trembling form and made a mock disgusted face. He used his free hand to rub his cheek, "Ah, gross, woman! I do not need your lips on my face after what just spilled out of them." He looked at the carpet, "Damn. I'm glad this isn't my house."

She giggled and elbowed him in the ribs, albeit a little sloppily, "Shut up, man. I need a little pick me up. I'm totally sluggish and I feel like shit. I need an upper."

He turned to face her, "You sure that's wise? You seem really fucked up. And you're high. You don't wanna mix that faggot shit with an upper."

She suppressed an irritated moan, "Bank, all the alcohol that was in my system is now on the floor." She looked at said carpet and crinkled her nose, "And it was like two hits."

He sighed and, after maneuvering Kagome to sit on a bed located about two feet to his left, he fished around his pockets for something to give to his friend. He had been dealing some shit to a fucked up couple when Kagome quite literally fell into the room. He remembered her confused face as she fell onto the floor, almost destroying his shoes. He had laughed at her as well as the couple that ran out of the room at the sight of her vomit.

"Okay, vicodin. Here."

She took one look at the bag and shooed it away, "I want something I can rail."

"You can rail that."

"Okay, fine. Something I can rail that isn't for chicken shit."

"You're ridiculous. Why am I friends with you?"

"And I said an upper! That's not an upper," she pouted and added, "and you're friends with me because you love me and your life would be so boring without me in it you probably would have killed yourself a long time ago."

He stared at her. "I have three pills of ecstasy left. You can have _one_."

She scoffed, "Okay first off, _one? _What the hell, man? And two, I said I want something I can _rail_."

"You can rai—"

"Fine, then I just don't want it. Try again." She crossed her arms and stared at him defiantly.

He looked at her and waited, as if contemplating. After a moment he put the two bags back into his pocket and sat down next to her. She didn't look at him, instead kept a firm glance on the door in font of her, arms steadfastly crossed.

"Look, Kags, I know what you want. I can't give it to you."

She broke her gaze with the door and whipped her head to the side, daring him to answer, "And why the hell not?"

He sighed, "I promised Ko—"

She stood up and glared at him, fire in her eyes and strain pulsing from her clenched fists, "Okay that is so _completely_ unfair!" She uncurled her hand to point at him, and at then herself, "I introduced the two of you and that means you have allegiance to _me, _damn it!"

He stood up with her, only taller than her about two inches, "Kagome, he's right. You're gonna hurt yourself. You go through this shit faster than anyone else I know. And I deal. So that's saying a lot."

What he said had registered and her anger seemed to dissipate. She felt almost ashamed for becoming angry; she knew he was only worried about her… and damnit she wanted to stop not her only for her friends' sakes, but for her own health a well but… just this time. Just this one, last time.

She sighed, "I _know_, Bank. And thanks for worrying. But please?" She looked at him with puppy dog eyes. He tried to look away. _Damn _those eyes. He'd never been able to say no to them. "Just this last time. Then I won't ask again, okay?"

Oh, man. He should have just run away with the couple the second she fell into the room.

But he was defeated. He was very much aware of that. "Fine." He fished around his pockets for third bag and, upon finding it, handed the cocaine to the eager young woman. "Hope you enjoy it," he said halfheartedly.

After her squeals, money, many thanks, hugs, kisses, and declarations of undying love, she ran happily out of the room and he was left to ponder his decision. He came to the conclusion that was basically already dead. The amount of people that were going to want to murder him after what he had just done was astounding. We're talking her friends, his friends, Koga's friends, him_self_… curse his stupid fucking lack of willpower concerning the spitfire, slip of a woman. He yelled as he picked up the nearest object, a lamp, and threw at the other nearest thing, a bedpost.

"Fuck!"

* * *

­­­­­­­­

A/N: oh man… I'm sorry… please don't be mad / finals ended yesterday for me. It's summer now. I'll write more! It was hard… I was taking classes at my highschool and at a college. Blah. I'm officially a senior now though! :)

**Okay. Please review. That's all I cam say. It's like **_**my**_** cocaine! Okay. That wasn't funny. Sorry.**


	10. Nightmare

Oh man, it should be entirely illegal to feel like this much shit. Seriously, who the hell's bright idea was it to invent hangovers? And crashes? She was just starting to come down from her high. You'd think it would have happened when she had passed out on the floor of… somewhere. But oh no, someone far up in the sky obviously hated Kagome's guts with a fiery passion, because she was still tweaked. She woke up tweaked and crashing, and had a hangover that could rival the malice of the gods. What the _fuck_, man?

She was twitchy, shaky, really. She couldn't write because her hand wouldn't stay the fuck still. She could barely see two feet in front of her face because her vision was too blurry and her hangover induced, pounding head begged for sleep, but her racing heart wouldn't allow it. Whose bright idea was it to allow her to do this to herself? Whoever it was, she was going to _murder_ them. Slow and painful murder, now that was something she could indulge in. She shook her head back and forth trying to rid it of some of the jumble; the crash was so not-fucking-welcomed at the moment. It was making her pissed as hell, on top of everything else going wrong with her body.

An unsteady hand rubbed her eyes. Was it so much to ask for her heart to calm the fuck down so she could sleep?

Oh, and also, wanna know something splendid? Something so freaking _awesome_ that she could just jump around in circles, flailing her arms and shitting rainbows? She was sitting in fucking _class_, and she could feel fucking Inuyasha's fucking _eyes_ boaring holes into the side of her fucking face.

_Damn_ Sango for staying home today. _Damn_ her for getting drunk and _damn_ her for being the smart bitch that she was and staying home to get some online college courses done. And, most of all, _damn_ her for leaving an empty seat next to her in English and _damn_ the bastard sitting next to her for filling it. He didn't have to. He just did. Because he hated her. Holy damn, man… everyone fucking hated her today, huh?

And then her head shot up. A glorious memory. Oh, that asshole was going to _pay_. He did this to her! The dipshit… She gritted her teeth, "Bankotsu…" It wasn't much more than a menacing growl, but hot damn, a growl was worth a thousand ominous, pain-induced, nausea-building words.

"What?"

Her head snapped toward Inuyasha, the static around her eyes and scowl almost tangible, "None of your fucking business, _bastard_! Now turn the hell around and stop fucking staring at me!" She was seething in anger; it was getting dangerously close to where she'd have to scream and tear out her hair. She was goin to burst, damnit, she was going to _burst_.

Fucking coke. How much had she _done_?

* * *

Inuyasha stared at the tick the corner of her eye had mysteriously developed over the period of class. He watched as her hand shook almost uncontrollably on the desk and how she tried to desperately to hide it, attempting to hastily drum her fingers on the hard surface to mask how little control she really had over the offending appendage. She repeatedly rubbed her eyes, as if seeing straight was beyond her, and her breaths came in short pants. He could _hear_ her heart beat, he could smell her frustration with the lack of control over her body, and he could smell the drugs. Hell, one good sniff and he could smell every drink, hit, and drug she had taken the previous night.

It wasn't that she had never come to school with a hangover—he could always tell when she'd had a long night. But this was ridiculous. This was… just fucking stupid. Was she retarded? Not only could she have killed herself with how much shit he knew she'd ingested, but coming to _school_ like this? She needed to rest and she looked like she was about to keel over. Her erratic heartbeat sure as hell wasn't doing much to calm his nervousness. It was even more dangerous for her than if a human had done it because if a teacher noticed her behavior well, hell, it wouldn't take a genius to pick up the signs. They'd drug test her, and that… well that would be the end for her.

His concealed ears turned in her direction. Did she just say something? "What?"

Jeeze. He now wished he hadn't said it. She looked like she was going to lunge at him and gouge his eyes out with the pencil she could hardly pick up. He could feel the heat radiating off her in waves and prayed to God that whatever she was about to screech at him was screamed in the form of a whisper.

"None of your fucking business, _bastard_! Now turn the hell around and stop fucking staring at me!"

A few surrounding students turned to stare at them, but when they realized it was Inuyasha and Kagome they quickly turned back around, dismissing it as a normal brawl. The teacher didn't even spare a passing glance, though he was sure she'd heard it. He thanked God. If God existed, he thanked him profusely.

"Jeeze. Touchy, touchy. What's got you all riled up, princess?" As if he didn't already know. Though it would be absolutely grand if he could get her to tell him herself.

"Are you deaf? I just said it was none of your fucking business. Now if you would be so kind as to not be a piece of constipated shit and a pain in my ass for once. Leave. Me. Alone." She spat the last words with unbridled venom as she moved to massage her aching temples. Too bad her shaking hands did nothing but rattle her brain enough to make her blow up with irritation and unrestrained fury. Okay, that was it. She slapped her hand onto the desk, causing a rather frightening crack to be heard throughout the room.

"Fuck!"

All heads snapped to her direction. Inuyasha winced, that was a little louder than her last outburst.

"Miss Higurashi! I will not tolerate that language in my classroom! Be quiet or leave. I will not tell you again."

All eyes leered closely at the girl in question. Inuyasha's eyes were no different; he stared at her clenched fists and trembling features. He noticed the smallest bits of sweat forming at her hairline. Ah, fuck. He was going to have to do something, wasn't he? Her knuckles were turning white and he wouldn't have been surprised if her nails were drawing blood in her palm. She looked like she was ready to pick up her seat and hurl it to the front of the classroom.

Oh, shit. She was about to explode. He stood so quickly that he almost over-turned his own chair. The movement stopped her mouth from forming words… she was just about to going fucking ape shit on the teacher, but Inuyasha's voice stopped her mid breath.

"Sorry Miss Hursch," he said almost too quickly, "it was my fault. I'll stop pestering her."

All eyes widened. Even the teacher's. Even Kagome's. Did he just… oh yea. Yes, my friends, he did. Inuyasha Taisho, sworn enemy of the kickass bitch in question, just stood up for her. Took a hit… for her. What. The. _Fuck._

He almost couldn't believe himself. He sat back down at the teacher's nod and turned to look at the wide-eyed girl. Her mouth was slightly open from words not said, and all tremors had stopped in her body. She looked like she wanted to say some sort of something resembling thanks, but her stock-still body broke its trance and she groaned instead. The crash was over. Her heart beat slowed and the shaking ceased.

"Oh, thank God," she whispered as her head fell onto her desk. Sweet sleep came over her form almost instantly; Inuyasha felt it. He suppressed the urge to catch her head before it hit the desk, but decided one favor was enough for the day.

For… _ever_, actually.

* * *

He was trying to ignore it. Like really, really hard. Like, with everything that he _had_, he was trying to look at the teacher or at his notebook paper, and not at the girl beside him. But man, he could hear her breathing, erratic and anomalous, and he could hear her heart. He could smell her sweat and her distress, and it was starting to make him a little nervous.

He chanced a look at her. She was trembling. Very much trembling. Trembling a _lot_, if you will. Her eyes were clenched shut and her face was contorted into a rather pained looking sneer. What the hell was up with her? He attempted to ignore her. It was not his place to be in her business. And it was definitely not his place to be worried about her well-being. Damnit, if she died right there in her desk from stress induced heart failure then he was determined not to give a shit.

His attention back on the teacher, he focused in on her lecture and his notes. This lasted for about a minute in a half before he turned his head in Kagome's direction once more. She was struggling with something. Her heartbeat was increasing at an incredible rate, and now he could hear her whimpers, barely audible, but able to be caught by his demon ears.

Shit. What could he possible do? Well, more like, what would his reputation _allow_ him to do? There were probably tons of things that could be done to help her in actuality. None of which actions he could perform because, a, living, breathing people were in the immediate vicinity and b, she would never accept his help and c… damnit it all, he would never _give_ his help to her so… that's that then.

He watched a droplet of sweat at her hairline make its way down her forehead. His eyes trailed the path, slowly but surely, and he watched her body quake, the rate at which it shook increasing rather rapidly. He looked around the classroom; no one was even aware of what was happening at the back of the class. If they did, they were ignoring it.

There were six rows of desks from front to back; they were in the middle of the sixth row. This was a small class, so all other students inhabited the fourth row and up and for once, he was almost glad for the alienation as he stared at the girl next to him. At first he had only sat here to piss her off, but now he was glad for his decision, if only so he could keep an eye on her.

She was such a mess. How long could her body withstand that stress? The tremors could almost he classified as convulsions. That teamed with the racing heart… why that _fuck_ wasn't she awake yet?

And then it hit him. The same second he leapt from his seat to catch her falling form before it hit the ground, he smelt it—the scent of blood and tears.

He winced at the racket. Her chair had fallen along with his desk and the teacher's screech has enough to make his ears flatten against his head. "Inuyasha! Just what the _hell_ is going on back there?" Some students gasped at her language, but he overlooked her question altogether as he attempted to hold onto the girl that jumped out of his arms. She threw a scathing glare in his direction as she gathered her senses, ignoring the piercing stares of her piers.

She didn't spare even a glance, let alone an explanation, to anyone as she grabbed her bag from the floor and bolted from the classroom, leaving everyone to gape after her. Inuyasha followed suit, grabbing the unopened water bottle and a tissue box from the teacher's desk and mumbling something about the girl's bad health.

He ran out of the class, only to be met with an empty hallway. He could sense that she was just around the corner, though, and made a slow, seemingly careless stroll to where she was. He was hoping to appear nonchalant, to turn the corner and make a cutting remark about her nightlife and how pathetic her weakness concerning the drug was. He was going to scowl, throw the water bottle at her and growl a venomous 'clean yourself up' before walking back to class. Yes, that was what he was going to do.

But then, he actually did turn the corner. And there was Kagome, back against the wall, bag forgotten on the floor. Her breaths were deep and fast, eyes wide and brimming with tears, though none of them fell. Her eyes were boaring holes into the wall in front her as she pressed her hands almost too powerfully on her chest, on her heart, willing the beat to slow so she could see straight.

She was afraid. Scared fucking shitless, actually. _Damn_ those dreams! The images replayed in her mind, over and over like a movie picture. She had never been helpless before. She had never been cornered like that, without a chance in hell of escaping with her life.

"Kagome."

Her head slowly turned to look at Inuyasha, her eyes seeing past him though trained directly on his own. She didn't answer, just breathed heavily, quickly and deeply, while looking at his face and willing herself not to cry in his presence. Her hands were still on her heart, though she now allowed one to fall.

"You're bleeding."

What? Her free hand went to her face. Oh, she was bleeding. Her nose was allowing blood to freely descend down her face, sullying her shirt and the floor.

His look wasn't soft; he made damn sure of that. But it wasn't… mean, either. He held out his hands, water bottle and tissues in tow, but she hesitated to take them. Knowing him they were probably poisoned or something.

"Drink this. And for Pete's sake, wipe your face. You look like the worst kind of shit." When she made no movement that she heard him, he grabbed her hand, planning on forcing her to take the water. He was surprised when she yanked her hand out of his grasp and pulled it back to her person. As she cradled it to herself, like it was the most important thing in the world, he sighed, and willed back the urge to literally growl at her. "Look, Kagome, you did some heavy shit. A _lot_ of heavy shit. And don't try to lie because I can smell it all over you. You're just freakin' out because of the drugs that aren't out of your system."

No response. Ah, damnit.

She was examining every finger, every curve of her knuckle and skin to check it for marring. This was the anxious paranoia stage, wasn't it? "Dear fucking… look, I'm not made of _acid_ all right? Your hand is fine. So will you stop flipping a fucking bitch and take the damn tissues and take the damn water? I'm trying here. So just throw me a bone." He moved to touch her. She backed away.

Holy fucking cum soaked cock-sucking _hell_!

"Shit, man! You are a complete slave to this drug and it's fucking effects! I mean hot damn…" He turned a heel and started walking back to class, dropping the water and box onto the floor. If she wanted to have them, she could, but he sure as hell wasn't going to stand here and try and help this bitch if she didn't want it. "I haven't seen you this pathetic since the last time you cried in front of me," he added, gaining more distance between the two of them.

He didn't think she had heard it, didn't particularly _want_ her to hear it. But her banshee screech and the piercing pain in the back of his head told him she had. His eyebrow ticked in annoyance as he turned around. His foot hit the side of a biology book. She hit him with a book? It was Kagome, of _course _she did. But the scent that assaulted his nose was enough to make him forget about it.

Tears made trails down her face as she pointed and screamed at him, "It has _nothing_ to do with the drugs! You don't know anything about me so stop with you're fucking high horse and your fucking nose!" She wiped her face harshly with the back of her hand, "You don't know the first thing about it."

She bent down to pick up her bag, her biology book forgotten at a certain asshole's feet. Closing her eyes, she allowed air to fill her lungs, body still and stopped. Just… stopping, was what she needed. An eerie calm had flown over her, all tears and blood had ceased falling. All that was left was a flushed face of an angry girl as her eyes glared up at him. Willing the hurt to not shine through as she spat, dangerously composed and low, "How _dare_ you bring that up you—you're such… a fucking _bastard_." She stood up straight and faced him fully, staring forebodingly, unbearably indignant, "I want you to get this in your head, Inuyasha. I _hate_ you. You are a fucking tactless, emotionless ass and I want nothing to do with you from now on. Do not talk to me. Do not _look_ at me. Just… stay the hell away."

She was backing away and he knew he should just let it be. He _knew_ he shouldn't have said it but damn, he always had to have the last word didn't he? Referencing that day, that moment was an unspoken agreement between the two. That they would just never do it. And here he was, doing it twice in five minutes. "Now why does that stream of angry I'm-such-an-abused-soul crap sound so familiar? Oh yea, it's been yelled at me before. And you know, you oddly resemble the whore that yelled it. She was a naive, petty, little cheating bitch just like you, two fucking years ago when she _last_ she screamed it! Shit, Kagome, doesn't your tune ever change?"

Silence.

He didn't mean it. Oh _man_ did he not mean it. And he would have loved to have told her, but her face silenced him. It was something he had never seen before—what emotion was that? A mix of things… awe, pain, spite, confusion, disgust. Mostly hate, throw in a little sadness. He almost called out to her retreating form, running from him as fast as her legs could take her.

He could smell the salt again. Her tears, how he hated that smell. He hated it two years ago, and he hated it now. How had this gone so wrong? He had been trying to help her, but he couldn't even do that right without screwing up the girl's life and fucking up her head even more than he thought possible, more than he already had.

She was right. She was so, so, _so_ fucking… right. She didn't need him at all. She was different, she had an _addiction_, and for fuck's sake, she had him. And looking back on it all, he might have just been the worst thing for her. How the hell had things gone so wrong? It was that day… that one stupid, shitty day that marked the turning point for them. If only that day had never come, if only he hadn't been so careless she would be—what would she be? Not this, that was for damn sure.

The day their lives had gone to hell. It was his fault. He wasn't so cowardly as to not admit it. It was all fucking him. But her retaliation was just… It was just so… It made him hate her. It caused him to hate her so much, as much as she despised him, at least. Yea, he'd hurt her, but she didn't have to hurt him back. She didn't _have_ to. But his stupid embodiment of the words 'ignoramus' and 'asshole' had driven her to. And as much he loathed her definition of payback, he hated himself even more.

"Shit." He hated thinking about this. And there it is again! Damn it to _hell_! Hate, hate, _hate_. Hate fucked him over in more ways than one. He just didn't want to give a flying fuck about this damned game anymore. He hated this game, this game of hate.

He, who had allowed a stupid decision to fuck up an amazing sixth months of happiness, he, who had allowed his monumentally tangible pride to fuck up every day since then. He, who had thrown himself such a huge pity party in face of his demon heritage, when she was suffering from the same thing all along. He, who was more than happy to look passed their shit to try and help her, only to fuck up her life even more. And, mother fucking _he_, who had just broken the girl with the iron will to the point of fleeing from him in her misery-lain dejection. Stupid, stupid, _stupid_. Stupid. Fucking. Hate!

He was some kind of asshole, wasn't he? He should just let her be.

He should really just… let her fucking be.

* * *

The first thing she did when she got home was collapse onto the floor. She had run the whole way and, even for her, that was a pretty freakin' far way to sprint while choking on her own sobs. Man, she felt like such a weak little street rat. She wished she could kick her own ass for it. Ah, if only Alina were here—where was she? England? She was always the one that made sure this kind of crap didn't happen.

She rolled onto her back. That really had happened, though, hadn't it? Not just the Inuyasha thing, not just the tears thing, but…

She looked at her hand, examined it further through her now clear eyes. It seemed to be fine before, and it seemed to be fine now. But in her dream it wasn't, so it wouldn't be for long. Damn it all! She _loathed_ the fact that this shit was really gonna go down. Her hands were her _weapons_! How long would it last? There was a cast on it so…

Oh, _fuck_!

"Fuck! Fuck fuck _fuck_!" There was nothing like screaming expletives in the face of a future she couldn't change. Fuck, shit, and _damn_ why couldn't she change it? This feeling was very familiar, the powerlessness. But this, _this_ just wasn't fair. It was just plain cruel! When she had a dream, whichever power hungry bastard in the sky that wanted to make it so she couldn't change the future she saw, well… she just wanted him dead. She wanted him dead in a thousand different ways, a thousand times over. A thousands different torturous, painful, _embarrassing_ ways in front of his older, hotter-than-him girlfriend!

_"I hope she dumps his ass in the gutter…"_

There was basic rule regarding Kagome and what she saw in her sleep: if it hasn't already happened, it will. She didn't often have dreams but, when she did, they were always in the form a past memory, or a future situation. And the situations she saw? They always happened. There was nothing that could be done to change them, nothing she could do to avoid any sort of pain she was sure to encounter. She could only sit, and wait—wait for whatever it was that was coming to find her, to get her, to _take_ her. The only plus side to this mass-paranoia inducing sub-ability was that she could sometimes be a little prepared for what life threw her way.

And what she saw in class was, well, in an easily understandable phrase: her worst fucking nightmare _ever_. She remembered it clearly, and it was enough to make her sweat all over again. She couldn't tell where she was because it was so obscurely dark and she wasn't alone, that was for damn sure, but she would bet her left tit that the people hiding in the shadows weren't selling girl scout cookies. Normally this would be a walk in the park for her. Imminent danger? Naw, no sweat. But what was different, what made this scenario so much more frightening than the next—she didn't have her ability. Her hand was broken. It was _broken_ and therefore, completely unusable. How the hell was she supposed to live her life if she couldn't be different? She was not _normal_, damn it! And she could not _live_ if she was forced it be, even for a day.

There was a freaking cast on her mass-destruction inducing weapon. How was she supposed to exist with a cast on her weapon? That was the same as existing _without_ a weapon. Which was the same as being completely powerless. Which, subsequently, was just going to make her a weak son of bitch walking around with a neon sign above her head that would say some variation on the words 'fresh meat, come get some now!"—aka, while you can—aka, while she has this fucking cast on her arm that makes it so you can pretty much do anything you want to her and there's not a damn thing she can do about it.

And the sucky part of it all? This wasn't a hypothetical. This was _going_ to happen to her and she didn't know if she was going to come out of it alive. It was so real… she felt the terror down to her bones when she dreamt of it in class. She felt the hole inside of her where her ability laid, brewing, _alive_, but dormant, not able to come out to her defense. It felt like death. Plain and simple.

And then there was fucking _Inuyasha_. Okay, she could admit it to herself that she was almost, kind of, maybe, something along the lines of some sort of grateful to him for getting her out of trouble with the teacher. And also… sorta, kinda happy that he didn't let her fall to ground when she quite literally jolted awake and out of her nightmare, because hitting her head on the hard tile most likely would have caused some sort of brain damage or hemorrhaging, neither of which she was okay with.

"Kagome, are you aware that I could hear you screaming 'fuck' from the bottom of the stairs? And… that you're laying on the floor half inside your apartment, and half outside of it?"

"Yes. And I'm completely happy like this." She turned her head slightly to look at a sideways view of her best friend, "Go away, Sango."

"I left your place for five minutes to go get some aspirin. I come back and you're—there's dried blood under your nose, you know." Oh man, Bankotsu was going to look like a puddle when she was done with him. Granted, Kagome had been way freaking funny when she was tweaked on all that shit, and Sango was too drunk to give a damn _what_ she was on, but now she was awake and fully functional (well, almost) and Bank was going to pay with one of his _nuts_.

Sigh. "No, Sango, there isn't. Now can you go away?"

"Yes there—whatever. I'm going to sleep… and I'm going to steal an icepack from the guy that never locks his door on the second floor. My head hurts. I'll come back when I wake up."

"Okay _bye_."

"Jeeze. I love you too, best friend." And with that she was gone. Her fading steps could be heard in the direction of the stairs.

Kagome groaned. What was she silently bitching about again? Oh yes. But just because he found his heart for, like, a millisecond in his blackened, evil encrusted chest so did not give him the right to go _sniffing_ her and assuming things. And, okay, granted, maybe some of the things he had accused her of were actually true but that still did not make it okay for him to deduct it by _smelling_ her in the first place. She did not give her permission to be sniffed. And _still_, even more to the point, he was wrong. What she did during nightmare-induced hysteria had nothing to do with the damned drugs… maybe the bloody nose did. But that could have been from the nightmare too! How could she have known? She was _asleep_.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that he had no right to go and call her a druggy. She was not a drug addict. She was _damn_ sure she was not a drug addict. She could stop whenever she wanted… And where the hell did he get off talking about the past? The past was the past: _passed_. And it should stay there. They had both made a silent oath to never speak of it and there he was fucking _speaking_ of it!

Shit on fucking toast! It made her so mad… she could cry again. But out of frustration! Speaking of which… Oh man. Oh freaking pooch screw, mess of sin, and _more_ shit on _more _toast. She cried, hadn't she? In front of him? Going to school was going to be quite the bitch. In a short phrase, narrowing down the extremities of the experience she was sure to endure—It. Was going. To suck. _Balls_.

And if he dared even show his face around her, let lone make fun of her or _speak_ in general, she wasn't sure if she would be able to hold back. She felt like shit, thanks to her previous night's activities, and she could see her crap-feeling disposition last through the weekend until Monday because she sure as hell wouldn't put it passed the hangover gods to do something like that to her. She was fucking _terrified_ because of her nightmare, she was pissed as hell because of Inuyasha's existence, she was embarrassed because she'd cried, and most of all, as much as she hated to admit it… she was sad. She was miserable because she was reliving the damned betrayal all over again because he had to go and talk about it. _Damn _him for talking about it! Why would he bring that up? It was just so… _mean_… of him. Meaner than usual. Well, regardless, he did, and she fucking hated his guts for it. She told him to stay away from her, but she knew he wouldn't (that would be entirely too pleasant of him) and him disobeying her along with how shitty and frightened she felt, teamed with her basically tangible fury, embarrassment, and grief? She. Would. _Murder_. Him.

For his own sake, he'd better not be anywhere near the edge of her senses or her line of sight for the next two freaking _months_ because at this rate, if he ever found himself in her immediate vicinity, Kagome wasn't sure there would be anything she could do to stop her hands from ripping him in two. Though, now that she thought about it, would that really be all that bad?

She smiled. Then she frowned. It could be bad. She _could_ rip him two… but she could cry again as well. Seeing him scared her a little because, in all honesty, she wasn't entirely sure what he reaction to him would be. And what if it were the latter? _Then _what would she do?

Her thoughts were interrupted once more as she heard footsteps coming toward her from the stairs, "Sango, if you dare comment on how I haven't moved yet I swear—"

"Pathetic. Get up."

The hair on her arms prickled upwards at the sound. The second that cold voice met Kagome's ears, she was on her feet, arms tense and ready to block a blow if needed. Well damn it to holy hell, if she got on her knees and _begged_ for a break it wouldn't come, would it? Well then, yippity-fucking-doo-da, she loved her shitty luck. "Wow, just my luck. I wish for Alina… and I get you."

Kikyo gave her a once over, and she could almost feel the frigid, spiteful malevolence hitting her in waves with each stonily spoken word, "Come now, Kagome. Give your big sister a kiss."

* * *

A/N: and the plot thickennnssss! :)

Stay tuned!

And also… my heart broke in half a little last chapter. So little reviews I could cry about it. I hate begging, really…

**But ****please review****. Even if its just one word! It keeps me motivated…**

**I updated super quick for you! **


	11. Death

So. Um. Let me start off first by saying hi. And second I shall say I'm sorry, but I have a pretty good reason for not doing anything about this story in a year. After the last chapter, I immediately started on this chapter. I got half way done, then the next day I got started on a very heavy medication for migraines called Topomax. Or… topamax. Whatever. It's an anti-convulsant, but it works wonders for migraines. (Which was very needed, I missed 60 classes my junior years because of them and we decided I couldn't deal with that again.) So you can imagine it's strength. It made me an idiot. I'm not kidding you, for a full year I was somebody completely other than myself. I tried to write, really I did. I sat down countless times to do something about this chapter by I couldn't write a single word. There were no thoughts. Just nothing. Senior year was incredibly difficult for me. It like _gave_ me ADD or something. But focusing on anything for more than five minutes was a bitch. Anyway, I'm off it now. So I'll ask you to please not be upset with me for not writing. I really wanted to. I hope this chapter kind of makes up for it. It isn't especially long or anything, but it gives you some insight on why Kagome is so messed up, and why she hates Kikyo. Okay, thank you for being understanding. Here you go!

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"Oh just _awesome_." Kagome immediately backed into her apartment's living room. She roughly shoved her hands through her hair, rubbing her temples with her palms in exasperation. "Would you do me the honor of either giving me a Nobel Prize winning explanation of why you're in my house, or getting the hell out of it?"

Kikyo winced at the volume of her sister's thunderous voice as she stepped inside and shut the door. Apparently she was not going to get a warm welcome after all the years of ceased contact. Though, now that she thought about it, her own greeting words were more along the lines of insulting and less along the lines of warm and fuzzy—she and Kagome hadn't really been overflowing with sisterly love these past few years.

"I'm here to get you. You are to come with me."

She stared at her. Well that couldn't have been a more dodgy, bossy, cryptic, annoying, enter-some-other-displeasing-to-Kagome-adjective-here statement if Inuyasha himself tried to think one up. But that was Kikyo and _that_ was one of that many reasons why Kagome loathed every inch of her. Kikyo and her _damn_ superiority complex were hard to stomach; she was actually getting nauseous at the woman's audacity.

She crossed her arms and hissed through her teeth, "Oh, swing and a miss. Now get out of my house."

Kikyo was a paler, much more stoic version Kagome, with enough baggage to sink a navy ship. None, however, rivaled the woman when a glare was in order. Or a command, for that matter. She loved her false sense of dominance she just _had_ to have over everyone and their mothers.

"I'm your older sister. Can you just _do_ what I say for once?"

"Find me a sister that didn't kill my parents and I'll obey her unconditionally! I _promise,_" Kagome snapped with her hands clenched tightly into fists. She kept them pressed to her sides, every inch of her focused on _not_ ripping the bitch into tiny, bite sized shreds.

Kikyo didn't say a word, only studied Kagome fume in her exasperation. If anything, she almost looked amused. In a slightly vexed way.

She was going to snap. _Seriously_. Breath in, breath out. Fake smile. Here we go. "I'll tell you what, _Kikyo_, I won't call the police if you get the fuck out now." She stopped, realizing that threat was too empty to even laugh about, then added, "If you don't, so help me _God_ my foot is going so far up your ass."

Kagome didn't really expect Kikyo to move, really she didn't—thatwould just make her evening far too pleasant. The universe wouldn't give her freebee like that, would it? No, it would not. Still though, when the chick refused to budge, Kagome's gasket blew. "Okay. I warned you." No, she did not expect this to work out well for herself. Did she often do self destructive things? Why, yes, yes she did. She started toward Kikyo, her hands placed roughly on the small of her back, attempting to push her in the direction of the door.

Apparently this was the wrong move—okay, her bad, _sorry_—because Kagome found her self met with the most unpleasant of coffee cups so unpleasantly and unceremoniously flung against her head. Her _head._ Come _on_. What an utterly unpleasant experience. Flying coffee cup. No shit.

"Ow! What the _hell_!"

Kikyo smiled lightly—a rare occurrence, Kagome hadn't seen one of those in years—watching her opponent jump around, cradling her head in obvious discomfort. "Don't touch me. I don't trust you not to divide my body's elements into God knows how many chemicals." She could have sighed at Kagome's dumfounded expression, "It would undoubtedly kill me. Idiot." Her face screamed confusion, still. Kikyo scowled, yet moved on despite the girl's stupidity, "And I have explained the past to you several times. I did not kill _our_ parents. You're astounding inability to understand anything at all _ever_ astonishes me."

She blanched, her head forgotten. "Okay first off I couldn't even do that if I wanted to. Which I _do_. And secondly yes, you _did_ kill them. Death is death is death. Your hands are your hands so why don't you just lay back, accept the fact that I will forever hate the sight of you, and make good with the fact that it's justified?" Kagome turned away as she made her way to couch. She _did_ hate Kikyo, she thought; after everything, the only feeling she could possibly find for her sister was hate. And some fear. Maybe.

Kagome put her feet up on the coffee table and her hands behind her head. Kikyo watched, eyes darkening with the overwhelming sense of being written off.

She didn't _loathe_ Kagome, per se, but damn if she didn't annoy the holy hell out of her. Looking at the girl was literally like looking at a version of herself that she could have been had she not been the very spawn of family dysfunction and Murphy's Law. They looked exactly alike, so much so that they could have been twins, so the fact that Kikyo was older by two years and only a half sister to Kagome was on the verge of appalling. In appearance it was easy enough to tell them apart as Kikyo wore dark eye makeup—not not horridly excessive, but dark enough to match her composed, horrifyingly deadly disposition. Her lips and cheeks remained free of color as she took on the appearance of a porcelain doll—her immaculately spotless skin and flawlessly sleek hair demanded such a perfect nature.

Yes, a glare from this woman could be quite lethal and, actually, it was more often than not as her temper was more of a short stick than she let on. She wasn't sure how much longer Kagome could continue berating her before she broke one of her more important appendages. The flying coffee cup, mysterious as it was,—Kikyo shoved down a chuckle that threatened to rise to the surface—had only been a fraction of what she could do with her ability, for they had shared a different mother whose power's aspects had been pulled in two different directions between the two girls when they were born.

Kikyo was soon lost in the reverie of her mother who could have quite possibly been one of the most powerful differences the world had ever known to have created a being like Kagome with a mere _human_ as a father. She wasn't stupid; though she was vastly more trained than her younger sibling and could crush her beneath her feet at the current moment, Kagome could destroy ten demons with three times the level of Kikyo's power given a little training. It would only take the snap of a finger.

And that was why she was here.

She had been watching Kagome. She knew that was trying to get stronger. It was time for her to join the ranks of great demons, differences, and deixas like herself. It was time for Kagome to join the Commission; but damn it all if Kagome didn't want anything to do with any part of her. She wore red lipstick—a deep red, almost purple—and colored her cheeks just _because_ Kikyo didn't. She refused any eye makeup, excluding basic mascara, purely because she wanted to be distinguishable from her sister.

It wasn't always that way, Kikyo thought with a sigh. There was a time when they wore matching outfits and held hands at supermarkets, finished each other's sentences and shared an unconditional love that sister's often share. They weren't twins, but they might has well have been. There's something about being different that brings siblings together—especially two that have the same face.

However, this concept can and did go both ways. After the accident, to Kagome looking at Kikyo was like looking at a version of herself that she would always despise. It was like wanting to stab herself in the heart every waking moment of every single day. The day her little brother was born had changed everything for them.

Now, Kikyo and Kagome both shared a mother. Kikyo's father was a one of the first differences to be black bagged when she was at the tender age of one year. Having a child and needing support but not wanting to bear the pain of losing another husband to the prejudice of the government, her mother remarried almost immediately to a human. The wedding night marked Kagome's conception.

Their mother learned to love the man very much, but she never told him of what she was. She buried her powers in her past, thinking that if she just pretended they weren't there, they wouldn't be. The government's system for dealing with demons was getting stricter and better known as time went on. She would gage her husbands reaction to the news whenever a story of such interest was released and he would slander them terribly; he called them heathens, monsters. Some of them were. She had to admit that the demons they showed on TV were rather destructive.

If only he knew how gentle some of them were. If only he knew his daughters, his beautiful daughters, were two of the fiends he hated so much.

She had already told them that once their powers started developing that they were to never use them. She told them they were to never tell anyone of whom or what they were. They were _human_. They were and forever would be normal because that was what was socially acceptable. She begged her daughters not to judge their father for the terrible things he said about their kind and that it wasn't his fault—his mind was washed by the media and the government and he only knew what they wanted him to know. Kikyo, though extremely young, argued that he should love every part of them anyway. She often found herself missing her old father and disliking her new one.

The family lived a relatively happy life for twelve years. But at the tender age of twelve, Kikyo had been forced to do the unthinkable to save what little she had left. A feat she considered to mark the death of a free-spirited young girl and the birth of whatever it was she had become. What had she become? She didn't laugh, she hardly smiled, she had somehow managed to alienate the person who had loved her unconditionally, save for Alina. But who knew where the _hell_ Alina was. Parading around fucking England, she thought bitterly. _Fuck_ that day five years ago. Damn it to the furthest, shittiest place the universe had to offer.

The world had killed their family. The world had no idea what fair _was_. The world would certainly not have allowed her fucking _human_ stepfather into their lives, a bigot as he was, to ruin them, if it did. No, it definitely wouldn't have allowed her little brother to die in the way he did, and her _mother—_

Her thoughts must have shown on her face, because Kagome—bless her heart with her complete and utter lack of self preservation sense—interrupted her thoughts with an uncouth, "What in the world is wrong with you? You look like someone just stabbed your puppy."

She went still. Memories rushing to her head, blood pounding in her ears, the _insolence_ of that demented girl.

Rage, Kikyo thought. How foreign, to feel rage. A pure, unadulterated hated bubbled up within her. She screeched and twisted her face into the worst kind of snarl.

To Kagome, she didn't know what in the holy hell was going on. Actually, she had an idea when the most horrible growl erupted from Kikyo (she'd have to ask her how she managed to make such a menacing sound) and—well, it's not really that she didn't see it coming, it was all just too damn fast for her to do a damn thing about it—she was thrust against the wall, _hard_. And now, oh fuck, she thought wearily, there was pretty much nothing she could do to get out of it.

Kikyo compressed air with the slightest movement of her hands. She scrunched the chemicals in air together, allowing them to become something akin to a solid mass or hold weight when the object in question was unable to slip through the space between the elements. And oh, did Kagome ever feel that compression. It felt like she was stuck between her living room wall and something resembling brick _house_. And through all of this, she couldn't help but wonder, what in the hell did she _say_?

"You know what Kagome? I _did _kill them. How about that?" Kikyo was through. She was done trying to get this girl to listen. She comes down here, forced by her agency to recruit this fucking brainless piece of fucktard and what? She gets her shit stirred up in the nastiest way because _yes_, it was an _excellent_ idea to visit the one link she had to the incident that ruined her. "Did you ever consider I killed him to save _you_?"

A few yards away, one hand raised, keeping Kagome in place against the opposing the wall, the other slowly, but surely, closing, choking the girl into submission, "I wish I had let him kill you, you arrogant, ungrateful little brat!"

The day Souta was born, it was such a happy day for all of them. That day they had come home from the hospital, mother and son both declared healthy, friends and neighbors eagerly awaiting the arrival of the family with smiles as bright as the sun. It was bliss, for exactly five hours. When the doctor had shown up, dutifully 'warning' the family that the results of Souta's blood test were less than promising, that he was _different_, everything she had loved was squashed into the ground. The universe then decided her life was insignificant. Her father had said 'I see' with a look that clearly said 'we didn't know you took his blood'. He promised the doctor that he would take care of it, saying 'thank you' as politely as possibly. At the time, as she watched the whole encounter leaned over her cereal bowl at the kitchen table, she hadn't known what _take care of it_ meant.

Thirty seconds later she would learn it meant killing her baby brother in a fit of anger so palpable, she could have combusted under the heat of his rage. He screamed at her mother, calling baby Souta an abomination, a demon, though he meant it as derogatory as possible, not literally, never literally. As he strangled Souta, her mother refusing to hurt the man she loved with her different abilities, Kikyo ran into her room and demanded that a frightened, twelve year old Kagome stay in her room at all costs, no matter what horrid noises she heard, that mommy and dad were having a fight.

When she had finally dared to come out, Souta was dead. That man had strangled her little brother—he looked peaceful, almost as if he were having a nice dream. But she knew. She stared, eyes wide at a horror that should never be forced on a child. He stabbed her mother repeatedly right in front of her, the look on her face trained on Kikyo, pleading with her to take Kagome and run to someplace safe, where their father could never find them. No, not father. _Monster_.

She desperately wanted to obey her mother's last wish, she _did_, but her own rage, laden

with vengeance and turmoil, wanted otherwise. She unleashed her untrained ability, smashing what she assumed was similar to a something _very heavy_ on her father. The force, thick, compressed air, repeatedly, up and down, up and down. When she grew tired of it all, she picked him up, thrust him to the wall, then to the other. Side to side, up and down, floor to ceiling. He was broken, _so_ broken, she could have fit what was left of him in a shoe box.

She remembered every detail. She remembered falling to her knees, panting with the strain dealt to her physical and emotional being. She wished she couldn't remember, but it was if it had happened the previous night. It probably had, she thought, in her dreams. Every dream, all the time, every night. She remembered pulling herself by her red-soaked arms across the floor to her mother. Had she seen? Was she alive to watch her death be avenged? She cradled her body, lifeless as it was. There was so much blood. Blood _everywhere_. Kagome was covered in it, her wide, horrified eyes a stark contrast to the crimson. Had she been watching? She must have been, to be covered in so many pieces of her father.

Hard wall against her back, immovable force around her throat, Kagome tried with all will she had to spit a malicious 'fuck you' at her sister. It proved worthless, the force of such a trained ability wrapped tightly around her neck forcing anything other than a gasp back down. Yet she demanded the words 'I hate—hate you' come through, and she knew her own grave was being dug. She felt Kikyo's thick, unyielding spite. She really didn't understand what she could possibly be thinking, what reason she could have for this horrid treatment. Kagome had done _nothing_ to her.

She had lived with her for as many years as she could stand; she bought groceries for them, stole anything they would need. She outran the cops too many times to count so that the two of them could stay afloat—Kikyo off doing God knows what.

She didn't say thank you, she didn't acknowledge what she went through to do the things she did. She just took and took and said the occasional 'good, we'll need this'. She supposed that was as close to thanks as she would ever get.

Kikyo explained to her once the facts of her family's death. As a twelve year old she had blocked out the memories and accepted Kikyo's words as truth. But as the months passed, and pieces of the puzzle fit together to form a terrible scene that would forever be imprinted in her mind, the story she was told seemed less and less likely.

She had seen it—she _knew_ what happened. Kikyo and her lies, Kikyo and her family's blood, Kikyo and her horrible, ugly fucking face.

She never wanted to see her. She never wanted to be her. She just wanted Kikyo to _die_. Why couldn't she just die?

"Just die," she whispered. It was so hard to breathe. She knew Kikyo wouldn't kill her, but she was very aware that she was about to black out all over this floor. "Go join my family in the hell you threw them into."

And then, the force was loosened. Air, sweet _air_. But also, all the pain. So much. Her hand, this pain, how was it all happening? Was she actually _surviving_ this? A bloodcurdling scream—that's all she could really do other than exist. Kikyo's face was now impassive. No emotion, she pushed it back down, where it was safe. And her hand was made into a fist clasped tightly together, crushing Kagome's with collapsing air.

It felt like shrinking steal, she thought. Between the tears and screaming, all she could think about was the metal, not there, but somehow very real, crushing her livelihood. It _happened_, she couldn't believe it happened. Her own sister did it; she couldn't blame herself for not seeing it coming.

And then she was on the floor, gasping, grasping and cradling her hand—bloody, bruised, and broken. Fuck.

Kikyo looked at the floor at her feet. She wouldn't look at her victim after that brash display. This was why she didn't feel. Feelings caused horrible things to happen. She thought back to that night, they _always_ caused her to do _horrible_ things. Why only her?

Calm, poisonous exterior back in place, "Kagome," she looked at the door, contemplating the fresh air, and how she needed it, "I expect you to be ready the next time I come for you. You need to join the Commission." She chanced a look at the girl on the floor, "It is non-negotiable."

And then she was gone. How long did that all take? Kagome wondered with the small part of her brain that was still functioning, the part that wasn't shrieking at her in agony. Like four minutes? All of it, the entrance to the end?

It had happened. Her hand was so, _so _wrecked. What could she do but lay there? She was as good as dead anyway. She was sure she had enemies. Didn't _everyone_ have enemies? They would come for her now, they would beat her and—and—oh God—to be _defenseless_—

"K—Kagome?"

She blinked. "Shippo," she breathed, "I told you to stop breaking into my apartment you little fuck."

She was so relieved to hear his voice. It proved she was still a part of this planet.

He scrambled out of the farthest corner from beneath the kitchen table. "I—I saw everything. The woman—um—you need to go to the hospital."

"Just shut up and get the first aid kit."

He looked at her hand, eyeing it with unease, "I don't that's gonna do it."

She was almost out. Her eyes were so heavy. "Just do it, Shippo!" She shouted, and then added, in a soft voice as she left the world for a little awhile, "And then I'll make us some food okay? And we'll watch some TV. It'll be nice, won't it, Souta?"

And then, head on the ground, she was asleep, passed out, maybe. Shippo sighed. Of all the times he had to patch up this woman, he had never seen her so… just _so_.

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I'll have you know I've thought up so many nice things to do with this story. It's gonna be a long one. I'm about to be off to college, but I'll find time to write! It's UC San Diego by the way. So if any of you are there, represent! I'm very excited for the new experiences. Okay, review if you like, Lord knows I love it and constructive criticism is always welcome. Thank you!


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